Crossing over

The ship has a rhythm. It’s constantly in motion, although you don’t tend to notice it (unless a sudden movement causes you to stagger in the hallway). It’s subliminal—a quiet back-and-forth, too slow for the conscious mind to register, well below the flow of conversation. But it’s there. When I played John Coltrane’s “Psalm”—a timeless evocation of trance—for my class, I could suddenly feel it.

We’ve been crossing the Atlantic for the past five days, with a few more to go. Remarkable to travel thousands of miles, and not see anyone else—and hardly to see wildlife, although a few dolphins and flying fish have been spotted. The ocean does change color, apparently in relation to its salinity, from a light cobalt blue to a dark, moody color that matches one’s darker moods. And in traveling east, we’ve been losing time virtually every day. It hasn’t been easy to make it to breakfast on time—for several mornings, we’ve staggered in with just a few minutes to spare, grabbing as much omelet and yogurt as we can manage for four appetites.

The last port, Halifax, was relaxing. Although it’s fairly large—the biggest city northeast of Boston, they say, with a population of 375,000—it feels more like a slightly overgrown town. I walked about a mile and a half inland to find an electronics store, handily pointed out by one of the guides in the port—a tall, straight-haired blonde girl who was extraordinarily precise in letting us know exactly where to find it. I bought lots of stuff—voltage converters, a walkie-talkie, extension cords, thumb drives, battery chargers. All the streets slope uphill from the port, past portions of Dalhousie University, past a puzzlingly miscellaneous architecture—old clapboard houses, some well kept, others looking worn; large houses with stone foundations, often with Nova Scotia signs designating them as historic treasures; and these mixed in with fairly unimaginative, drab buildings from the 70s and 80s. I found a place that made marvelous iced tea; and we ate dinner in the Henry House, occupying one of those historical stone buildings (it apparently had been owned by a 19th-century businessman). The kids played on terraces while we ate a decent approximation of British food (we skipped the fish and chips). As the ship departed, we were serenaded by bagpipes and drums.

Since then, we’ve fallen into our regular schedule: A days and B days, each with their own teaching schedules. In some ways, it’s more demanding than my usual teaching regimen, because I have to spend time and energy transporting and setting up all my sound and computer equipment. Because my speakers were so awkward and heavy, they gave me a cart, which is currently housed in the Union on the 6th deck. Getting it to class means shoving the cart through the hallways across the ship and taking it down an elevator to my classroom. My computer is a separate chore—another set-up to show Powerpoint in the jazz class. Combine that with my tea (a necessity), paperwork (I forgot to bring in my class list to Global Music today), books, incidentals (I brought in a gankogui and clave), and you’ve got a mess. Thus far I’ve lost a mouse (dropped from the cart), a small sieve I bought for making tea, the cool (and fairly expensive) Teavana carafe, and perhaps (I haven’t seen it lately) the adapter that connects the Mac to a PC video system. For some reason, it doesn’t seem easy to find such lost things. I don’t know why—the staff is almost embarrassingly helpful, and the people on board are cajoled into forming an academic community, making theft seem impossible (it’s Mr. Jefferson’s University!). But things just disappear.

The girls have been staying up much too late. Partly it’s the time change: a 7:30 bedtime automatically becomes 8:30. But we’ve also shifted them to cots—so convenient to fold!—which means there’s no obstacle to getting up when they please. (They even fold up the cots, to get them out of the way or to turn them into comical little chairs.) When we’re not in the room, they turn on the lights, pull out books, and turn on the TV to a channel that plays muzak as accompaniment to a GPS image showing the ship’s current position. I’m sitting in the dark now, listening (finally!) to them settling to sleep. Celia refused to take a name this afternoon—I spent a good hour insisting that she lie down regardless, but I finally gave up and went with her into the public part of the ship. She’d walk up to everybody, saying, “What’s your name?” Some startled adult or student would respond, then ask her name. She’d reply “See-ya,” which sounded like a curt dismissal, but nobody minded. It almost made me want to go around asking, “What’s your name?”

At 9, I tend to drift upstairs to the “staffulty” lounge, where certain more derelict adults gather for cocktails. Sometime I’m probably going to start playing piano—why not? I’m used to it. But it’s also nice to end the day with a Guinness Stout and conversation. We’ll finally be making land in Spain in a few days. More then.