January 2022
Books read:
- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir by Ai Weiwei
- The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel
Trails walked:
- Wind River Trail snowshoe near Estes Park (January 7th and 9th)
- Black Canyon Trail near Estes Park (January 13th)
- La Barge Box in the Superstition Wilderness near Apache Junction, AZ (January 21st)
- Ute
Creek Golf Course cross country ski in Longmont (January 26th)
Song(s) of the month – Eliza Gilkyson – Eliza Jane, Coast, Death in Arkansas,
Touchstone, Peace Call, Requiem, Buffalo Gals Redux
Scientist Spotlight – Dr. Gang Chen, Mechanical
Engineer and Professor at MIT
January Summary:
You may have heard about the Marshall Fire in Boulder County that raged through the towns of Superior and Louisville, Colorado on December 30th. Spurred on by 100mph winds, the fire decimated neighborhoods in seconds. 30,000 people were evacuated, over 1,000 homes destroyed, and several more damaged. I remember getting a call from my son early in the afternoon that day. He lives in Louisville. “Dad, something is wrong, there is a fire somewhere and the smoke is getting worse. I’m having a hard time breathing.” He grabbed his wallet and fled to our home. Luckily his wife was Back East visiting her parents for the New Year holiday and his two-year-old son had spent the previous night with us, his grandparents; so he only had himself to worry about. There were horrifying stories of families fleeing, pets perishing, and houses being enveloped by flames in seconds. Two people lost their lives (an absurdly low number based on the speed of this fire). A close friend of our daughter’s had seconds to pack a bag of jackets for her 4 kids (the following day’s weather was forecast to reach below zero temperatures). As they drove off, they saw their home go up in flames. Many families spent the following nights in shelters (some are still there) and many will never be able to rebuild, since insurance companies only cover a percentage of the home’s true value and there are very few available homes for sale in the Denver metropolitan area.
That night, while
watching the news feeds, we were almost certain our son and his family had lost
their home also. Video taken near where
they lived wasn’t promising. It was only
the next morning, when they found out from a neighbor who jumped police lines
that their home was spared by mere yards.
They were very lucky, even though there was still some smoke damage and
also some plumbing damage, mainly due to the fact that zero-degree temperatures
followed the next day, and the gas was cut off so the remaining homes were left
without heating for the freezing pipes. It
was a freakish disaster; a December fire fueled by hurricane-force winds followed
by zero-degree temperatures. That’s not supposed to happen. But the thing is, we are seeing freakish weather-related
disasters more and more frequently. We know why,
but we still refuse to address the problem, like frogs in slowly boiling
water.
This month has
been a great reading month, with five great books from American, Indian,
Korean, and Chinese authors. I’ve also
managed my first snowshoe hike and cross-country ski attempt, along with an Arizona desert hike while I was
back in Phoenix helping with the aftermath of my mother-in-law’s death.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our current age of disinformation. I’ve read many papers about it. It’s no longer possible to convince someone of a scientific fact with data; especially when that scientific fact doesn’t fit into one’s ideology. So, do we just let this all happen? What do we do? Here’s a story.
My wonderful mother-in-law passed away suddenly recently. She was 86, so suddenly doesn’t seem like the right word, but it really is the right word to anyone who knew her. She had many years of life left in her. She was a staunch conservative which created some tension with her daughter who is a staunch progressive. But in the past few years they grew very close and would never talk politics. She would stay with us for weeks at a time and saw how much effort I put into researching and acting on how to address climate change. Occasionally she would ask me about some detail about carbon or global warming and I would answer as best I could. She asked why I spent so much time on this in my retirement years and my answer lately was that it was for my grandson, her great-grandson. She and I have always had a great relationship; I have always respected her, and she has always respected me. She eventually changed her mind on climate change and told me to keep on keeping on with my work in this area. When I called her after the Marshall fire to let her know that my son’s family had to evacuate, her first response was, “That darned climate change!” It made my day, my week, my year!
This is how we address the disparity of information. We keep close relationships with those we love and respect, especially when our political differences are large. We keep the dialogue open, and we tell stories to each other. We act locally when we can because the national dialogue is too toxic and potentially unchangeable with biased media and social media.
So, give a hug to someone you love whose political affiliation is opposite yours. It may eventually invite a conversation that bridges the disinformation ravine.
I read about Dr. Chen just after I finished reading one of this month’s books 1000 Years of Joys
and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei. Like Ai Weiwei’s
parents, Dr. Chen’s parents were sent to work
in the labor camps during the “cultural revolution” which cracked
down on intellectuals. In 2018 the US began
an initiative to crack down on Chinese espionage and, like many government programs, it went too far. Dr.
Chen was arrested on January 14, 2021. His
charge was that he hadn’t revealed his connection to other scientists in China
when he applied for a federal grant for research. His ties were never under suspicion, but not
revealing them was now against the law.
His work is in heat
transfer, and he hopes to develop a semiconductor that could convert heat from
car exhaust into electricity, or fabric for clothing that could cool the body. Since his arrest, all his graduate students
doing research were moved to other projects, so he’s lost a lot of time. The US government
dismissed all charges this month. It’s
sad and ironic that he left China because of their political repression of
science and ideas. In his interview with the New York Times, he said, “I am
angry, I am afraid. My love is science. I did not want politics, right? I saw
that, and I got away from it. I do my devotion to science. I help people, I
support. But I learned that you can’t get away. Politics impacts everybody. So
if there are things that are not right, we all need to speak out.”
Gilkyson is another
of the many great Austin singer songwriters, although she was born in Los
Angeles and has also spent a lot of time in northern New Mexico. I put her in the same category as Lucinda
Williams – a great writer and singer who has never really gotten her due. They have both been able to make a good living,
but the songs are so great, fame should have found them. Eliza has made 25 albums (two of them Grammy
nominated) in her 50 plus years of being an artist. Her dad, Terry, received an
Academy Award nomination for his song Bear Necessities from The Jungle Book movie. In addition to her songwriting, she is also an
activist on issues of water conservation and migrant workers’ rights. It was really hard, but I ended up choosing seven
of her many incredible songs to profile here.
Eliza Jane – A good friend recently gave me a moniker that
I’m actually kinda proud of; she said I’m an Apocaloptimist – Someone who knows
it’s all going to sh&t but still thinks things will turn out OK. Well, this song that Eliza Gilkyson wrote to
herself describes this feeling perfectly.
I'm so worried about everything
Dogs are barking, birds are singing
I'm so worried about everything
Listen to it here and below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmq8YFEfnQw
Think I need to be alone for awhile,
Find out what ever became of me.
Listen to it here and below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJvLJALeM-o
Death
in Arkansas – So many
topics in this great song that was written by her brother Tony. Family, land, trees, overdevelopment. It’s wonderful.
The wind that knocked us down in the fields
And the girls with the southern drawl
And those that came before were the pictures on the wall
Listen to it here and below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9zTTAXd4Z4
Touchstone – I was listening to this song as I was driving to Arizona this month after hearing of the death of my mother-in-law. She was the Touchstone for her family.
Your love has changed me for the better
Listen to it here and below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-D4Hlq8v2Q
Peace Call – Her rendition of this Woody Guthrie
song is brilliant and she has help from Patty Griffin, Mary Chapin Carpenter,
and Iris Dement. Wow! Woody never recorded it, but she found the words
and set it to a perfect soundtrack.
Get ready for my bugle call of peace
Listen to it here and below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFctwi5Tswg
Requiem – She wrote this after the
devastating 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia that killed a quarter of a million
people. It’s a hauntingly lovely prayer
that people have used to honor victims of many disasters since.
Mother Mary, full of grace, awaken
Taken by the sea
Mother Mary, calm our fears, have mercy
Buffalo Gals Redux:
A traditional western song given new life from a woman’s perspective. It’s just a fun song which shows her range of
styles.
No more water, the fire next time
In my May 2020 blog I reviewed Between the World and Me by Ta’Nehisi Coates which was published in 2015. It started my old white man aha moment about our country’s history and how we’ve been particularly uneducated about the black experience in this country. What I can’t believe now, is that James Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time in 1962! He was stating things back then that I’ve only heard about since the Black Lives Matter movement and reading Coates’ novel. Why wasn’t I taught Baldwin’s works when I was growing up? I’m sure some people were, but certainly not in New Mexico. The more I read about all of this, the more I understand what Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are all about, and the more I believe they are a necessary piece of the puzzle to getting to the end of racism in America.
In a letter to his nephew about white people: You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.
The black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.
The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.
From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded—at least, in the same way.
The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it.
Yes, I knew two or three people, white, whom I would trust with my life, and I knew a few others, white, who were struggling as hard as they knew how, and with great effort and sweat and risk, to make the world more human.
I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.
For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart—or, as they like to say, progress.
The trailhead starts at the eastern terminus of the Alva B Adams Tunnel. Alva Adams was a Colorado Senator in the 1920s and 30s, and the tunnel was a four-year project (part of the Colorado Big Thompson project) completed in 1944 to transfer water 13 miles from the Western Slope to the growing cities of the Eastern Slope of the Rockies. It’s part of the Colorado River allocation project and the water transferred is stored in several reservoirs along the Front Range (Lake Mary, Estes Lake, Carter Lake, Boulder Reservoir, among others). The pumps along the Western Slope that send the water through the tunnel are powered by the Eastern Slope power plants by a 69,000-volt nitrogen filled power line that rests on top of the tunnel. Fascinating.
I skirted the edge of the small reservoir and then headed uphill along the Wind River. The trail eventually flattened out with a few ups and downs until I reached the junction with the Storm Pass trail. The Storm Pass trail was not passable here without trudging through waist deep snow, so this is where my hike ended. The wind was howling on this day and the trees were making all kinds of strange noises. I was constantly turning around suddenly (while tripping over the large snowshoes) wondering what that noise was….it was the trees. I wonder what they were trying to tell me…. they were probably just laughing at my snowshoe clumsiness.
A couple of days later I came back up here with my wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandson to test out the ski-fitted kid carrier that is normally outfitted to be pulled by bicycle. We didn’t make it very far on this day due to wind and cold, but it didn’t matter. We played in the snow a bit and headed home.
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| Bighorn sheep on the drive up |
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| Skiers had already cut a path near the trailhead |
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| Small reservoir at the Alva B Adams tunnel |
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| Lots of snow on the informative sign |
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| Buried trail signs |
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| Here is where the snow was too deep even for snowshoes |
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| Nice winter scene |
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| Nice views |
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| Wife, grandson, son, and daughter-in-law a couple days later |
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| Freezing wife waiting for DIL and grandson |
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| Wife and son |
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| DIL and grandson playing in the snow |
Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun – I did something with this book that I have done with some movies, but never with a book. I read it over again right after I finished it the first time. Partly because it was only 150 pages, but also because I was searching for more clues about what happened in this mind-boggling story. It’s not your typical crime story even though the first chapter starts out like one, with a police detective interviewing a murder suspect.
The story is told from the viewpoints of three different women associated in some way with 18-year-old Hae-on who was tragically killed during summer break in her senior year in high school. You (or I, anyway) are never really able to wrap your mind around who killed Hae-on and why, but after two readings I have a general idea of what happened. However, that’s not really the focus of the novel. It was written to examine the psychological impacts on those left behind in the years following the murder. In addition to examining these impacts, there are also elements of social class advantages and disadvantages (one of the suspects was from a lower class and the other was from an upper class---guess which one gets the worst treatment from the police?).
The novel won best international crime novel of the year from CrimeReads.com and also was the favorite book of the year from the Washington Independent Review of Books and was an editor’s choice from the New York Times Book Review. A review by Vulture magazine stated that "Your enjoyment of it will depend on how you feel about ambiguity."
The author, Kwon Yeo-sun has received several Korean literature awards since her debut novel in 1996, but Lemon is the first of her novels to be translated into English. The translation was by Janet Hong who also won an award for her translation. Here are some of those translated lines:
I’d never seen a mishmash of such bizarre effects on a young woman’s face, to the extent that her face itself seemed a riddle. It was both familiar and unfamiliar, one I’d seen long ago yet never seen, and one I wanted to both avoid and scrutinize.
That was Da-on’s gift. She had a lively, bubbly kind of warmth that could pull Hae-on’s devastating, otherworldly, even glacial, beauty into our reality, dissolving it in laughter.
He used to break the first cigarette by accident as he plucked it out from a new pack. Whenever this would happen, he would become red in the face and lose his temper. After living a mundane, dull life, where a trivial incident like this was cause enough for him to become angry, he died.
The period of being stuck in a deep well finally came to an end. One day I observed my mother picking up objects and studying them, and then either moving them elsewhere or placing them inside something. I had to watch for a while before I realized she was cleaning.
“For example, somewhere in the world, a girl is born. She’s born into a family so poor she often goes hungry. She’s beaten, rummages through garbage for food, gets sick, and goes blind. When she’s eleven years old, she is gang-raped, stabbed repeatedly, and murdered. Then her body is thrown out in the same garbage dump where she’d rummaged for food her whole life. How can you believe in a god after that?”
Couldn’t each moment we’re living now be the meaning of life?
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| Nice views to the south |
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| Lots of rock climbing access trails |
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| Snow was fairly deep and no showshoes this time |
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| Longs Peak view |
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| Climbing wall along Lumpy Ridge |
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| Twin Owls climbing wall |
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| This rock cracked itself up |
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| Nice views as sun was getting lower |
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| Nice low sun |
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| Beautiful sky |
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| Large bull elk just hangin' out |
OK, so, the book. It’s a story about Rahel and Estha, twins born to their mother, Ammu and her alcoholic and abusive husband whom she leaves to return, disgraced, to her family home. The story jumps back and forth in time and weaves together the story of how a tragic event (actually a series of tragic events) can impact people for years. In an interview in 2007, Roy said this about going back and forth in time in the novel: “It was the most challenging part of writing the book. It begins at the end and ends in the middle. It took me a very long time to understand what I was doing… I could sense a rhythm and I trusted it. But it was only when I had written a fair amount that I saw the structure clearly—that one strand of the story takes place over a single day and the others weave across years. If it had been a straight, linear narrative it would have meant something altogether different. Each ordinary moment becomes more heightened, more poignant because it is viewed through the complex lens of both past and future.”
Her husband turned out to be not just a heavy drinker but a full-blown alcoholic with all an alcoholic’s deviousness and tragic charm.
When his bouts of violence began to include the children, and the war with Pakistan began, Ammu left her husband and returned, unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem. To everything that she had fled from only a few years ago. Except that now she had two young children. And no more dreams.
He began to look wiser than he really was. Like a fisherman in a city. With sea-secrets in him.
It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.
Every Thursday, undaunted by the merciless midday sun, they would stand there by the well. The young girl and the intrepid Jesuit, both quaking with unchristian passion. Using the Bible as a ruse to be with each other.
Baby Kochamma loved the…house and cherished the furniture that she had inherited by outliving everybody else.
She said that choosing between her husband’s name and her father’s name didn’t give a woman much of a choice.
Looking at herself like this, Ammu’s soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory—not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile. Like polishing firewood.
All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.
Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make more complex adjustments.
“Don’t use the name of the Lord in vain,” Baby Kochamma said. “I’m not,” Chacko said. “I’m using it for a very good reason.”
The taxi smelled of sleep. Old clothes rolled up. Damp towels. Armpits. It was, after all, the taxi driver’s home. He lived in it. It was the only place he had to store his smells.
The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then (she) was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.
As a child, she had learned very quickly to disregard the Father Bear Mother Bear stories she was given to read. In her version, Father Bear beat Mother Bear with brass vases. Mother Bear suffered those beatings with mute resignation.
The compound was littered with moons, one in each mud puddle.
The early morning heat was full of the promise of worse to come.
What came for them? Not Death. Just the end of living.
On the station platform Rahel doubled over and screamed and screamed. The train pulled out. The light pulled in.
They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.
La Barge Box – I’ve written about this, my
favorite spot in the Superstition Wilderness, in my January
2019 and January
2020 blogs. With the sudden death of my mother-in-law in Arizona I took
some time to think about her while revisiting this beautiful spot. I don’t have much more to say about this hike
beyond what I’ve written before, other than to say that after over a year in
Colorado, I find that I really do miss the desert. As much as I love the mountains, my hiking
life was mostly spent in the desert and it feels like home. Also, the Superstition Wilderness has some of
the most difficult hiking you will find; steep climbs, rocky terrain, water
crossings, boulder hopping, and many very pointy plants that conspire to collect
your DNA at every turn. My desert hiking
experience prepared me well for the mountain hikes I’ve been enjoying in
Colorado.
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| The jumbled peaks of the Superstitions looming |
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| Nice views of this rough wilderness |
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| Battleship rock and Weavers Needle |
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| Towering rock formations |
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| La Barge Box with lots of water |
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| La Barge Box sun and water |
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| Crazy rock formations towering above |
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| Serene water reflections in the box |
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| Beautiful |
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| Cliff reflections in the pools |
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| My lunch spot |
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| Streaming waters not movies |
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| Final look back |
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| Nice sky with Canyon Lake and the trailhead below |
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei –
I had heard of Ai Weiwei (eye way way) previously as a famous dissident artist from China who helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. But I didn’t know much more than that. He published this memoir in 2021. It tells the story of his father who was a famous Chinese poet during the Mao Zedong “cultural revolution” era. And then it goes on to tell Ai Weiwei’s story. One of his father’s poems is where the title of the book came from. They were/are both considered dissidents by the Chinese government, mainly for speaking the truth to too many people. The author’s father spent much of his life in labor camps (Little Siberia) in northern China where he raised his son. Life was cold and brutal in those camps and the stories about this time were the most compelling in the memoir. Ai Weiwei ended up spending several weeks in jail himself under horrible conditions, mainly because he was uncovering the truth about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed thousands of school kids. His stories about first using the internet in the 1990s to tell the world what was happening in China is interesting as his online accounts slowly disappeared due to government censorship. He is a fascinating person who certainly has an artist’s sensibilities, but he also is a social activist who has been able to use his international fame to help bring light to many of the world's humanitarian issues, not just in China. Here are some of the lines from the memoir that I enjoyed:
In 1910, the year my father was born, my grandfather had just turned twenty-one. The Qing dynasty was nearing the end of its 266-year rule, while in Russia the fall of the czars and the advent of the Soviet regime were just seven years away. It was the year that Tolstoy and Mark Twain died, the year that Edison invented talkies in faraway New Jersey. In Xiangtan, in Hunan, seventeen-year-old Mao Zedong was still in school; his first wife, selected for him by his parents in an arranged marriage, died a month before my father was born.
In the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment in Japan rose to 2.5 million, and the Japanese militarist government saw China’s resource-rich northeast as an economic lifeline. By September 18, 1931, Japanese troops occupied the city of Shenyang, the old Manchu capital, and in the months that followed they brought all three of China’s northeastern provinces under their control.
In satisfying the demands of the new order, the Chinese people suffered a withering of spiritual life and lost the ability to tell things as they had truly occurred.
In Little Siberia, isolation forged a closeness between us, and material deprivation brought with it a different kind of plenty, shaping the outline of my life to come.
...he didn’t want me to get too immersed in the world of books, because he knew the dangers that could lead to.
At the outset, Mao’s regime had confiscated all privately owned land in the countryside and redistributed it among the hundreds of millions of rural workers, thus gaining their trust and support. However, once land reform had eliminated the landlord class and enabled the appropriation of its wealth, the Communist Party reversed course, reclaiming the land and collectivizing it instead.
550,000 intellectuals would now be subjected to “reform through labor.” Twenty years later, when they finally received “rehabilitation,” only 100,000 would still be alive. By then, dissidence was all but dead.
Young people in China today have no knowledge at all of the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and if they knew they might not even care, for they learn submission before they have developed an ability to raise doubts and challenge assumptions.
The first case of SARS had been detected in south China in late 2002. What happened next resembled every other disaster in China: The government suppressed accurate reporting, while officials from the Ministry of Health claimed on television that the epidemic had been effectively controlled, and the World Health Organization removed Beijing from the list of affected areas. Then, on April 8, 2003, a military doctor revealed to foreign media the full gravity of the epidemic: his hospital alone had sixty cases, and six people had died. For much of 2003, the mysterious power of the epidemic was pitted against China’s opaque regime, freezing Beijing in near paralysis and deepening suspicion and hostility between people. The COVID-19 crisis in Wuhan seventeen years later would follow a similar pattern.
2008 Beijing Olympics: Migrant workers had been expelled from Beijing, and many shops had been shuttered: the everyday pleasures of normal people were suspended in order to satisfy the whims of the authorities.
I was waging a Sisyphean struggle, posting content that was constantly being deleted.
I am reminded of lines my father wrote after visiting the ruins of an ancient Silk Road city in Xinjiang: Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows / Not a trace can be found / You who are living, live the best life you can / Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory
Ute Creek Golf Course cross
country ski – Well
my first snowshoe trip was this month, so why not my first cross-country
skiing? It wasn’t in the mountains because
winds were supposed to be 30mph up there on this day, so my daughter-in-law,
grandson, and I decided to test it out on the golf course near our home. It was a beautiful sunny day with no wind and
temps in the upper 20s to lower 30s. We were
also testing out pulling a kid carrier on skis which turned out to be a pretty
good workout! I can’t say that I’ve gotten
the hang of cross-country skiing yet (I mean it’s been 45 years since I’ve even
skied period), but I think another trip (or two or three) around the golf course might do the trick
and then I’ll be ready for the mountains!
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| From the Alison Bechdel graphic memoir I read this month (see below) - maybe in 16 years I'll get the hang of it.... |
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| DIL pulling grandson with snowcapped mountains in the background |
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| Grandson had to help push |
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| Rookie - neither kicking nor gliding |
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| Great workout though! |
It's a world gone mad, pacifists paying for boot camp, feminists learning to pole dance, geeks flipping tractor tires...
Yoga: We're a nation of giant toddlers dragging our blankets (yoga mats) and water bottles wherever we go.
A new activity requiring a specialized roof rack seems to be invented every day.
Forget about triathlons. Now you have to run for days over a mountain range or through an obstacle course designed by counterterrorism experts to get any cred. (This reminds me of the folks I met in Crested Butte...)
While my mom was turning into a member of The Moral Majority, dad was having an affair with the young man who helped with their yardwork.
It was time to go Back East. And not just east, but to that hotbed of enlightened gaiter-wearing transcendentalists -- New England. Vermont had mountains built right into its name.
If I wanted to be fully alive, I was clearly going to have to scrape the bottom of my grief for my father.
Seven years after (my mom's) two and a half year prognosis, and ten weeks after her last workout at the "Y"...the undertakers came and wheeled her out the back door on a gurney. Not her of course, her body. The portal through which I'd come into the world....Next it would be my turn.
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| One of my first memories also looks like this, Nov 1963 |
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....Until next month, happy reading and rambling!