Books read:
- The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel)
- Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)
- Washington Square by Henry James
- The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Trails walked:
- North Table Mountain Loop near Golden (Dec 4th)
- Kohler Mesa – Bear Canyon Loop near Boulder (Dec 18th)
- Carter Lake near Berthoud (Dec 23rd)
Song(s) of the month: Fairytale of New York by The Pogues and Glen Hansard
December Summary:
The above photo was taken from our back porch this month. Winter air does something weird to the clouds. There's actually a name for it -- lenticular clouds, -- and it's caused by high winds blowing towards the plains from the mountains; and the winds are much higher in winter. Believe it or not I did zero photo-shopping on this photo. That's actually what the sky looked like on a cold winter morning. I still have to pinch myself when I realize that this is my daily view. After so many years in Phoenix with only other houses hovering over me on all sides, it's a site I'll never tire of. We've been in Colorado for 4 years now. It's hard to believe after 22 years in New Mexico, 40 years in Arizona, and now four here; and yes, if you're counting, that means I'm 66. Since our granddaughter was born last February, we've been spending about a week every month in Taos. So our journey of the southwest has come full circle (sorry Utah, you're beautiful, but we never managed to live there...although we spent a lot of time in Salt Lake City when my wife was working on a consulting job there).
I suppose it's that time of year when we look back on the past year to reminisce and to also look ahead to the new year with anticipation. On a personal level, 2024 was great: First granddaughter, trip to Oaxaca, 3-generation backpacking trip, visits to Taos and Leadville, grandkid babysitting, lots of great reading and rambling. And 2025 will welcome our 4th grandchild into this crazy world and hopefully more trips.
On a national or world level, perhaps it seems the news isn't so great from this past year and perhaps the future seems harrowing. If you've had your fill of bad news from 2024, then I have a list for you. You know how the end of every year gives us fun lists, like top 10 movies or TV shows, best songs, biggest news stories, etc.? I found my favorite 2024 list from Fix The News, a newsletter that I subscribe to in order to offset the everyday bad news that we've grown accustomed to. This list is titled 86 Stories of Progress from 2024 and it is full of great news in the areas of health, conservation, living standards, energy, human rights, and science and technology. Check it out.
This month I was able to read a new Murakami book, plus an older one upon which the new one was based; I also read a classic Henry James, and a recent award winning novel. I kept to the foothills for my winter rambling, partly because I was recovering from a nasty virus and my lungs (nor legs) weren't up to any high country snow shoeing...Maybe next month.
Things My Grandkids Say: "Mike!" My toddler grandson is just starting to put together his words, and it's such a joy to see kids thinking this through and expressing themselves verbally. I don't have a pet grandpa name like Granddude or Papa or T-Bone, so I'm just Grandpa Mike. The word grandpa doesn't come easily for toddlers, but "Mike" does. My oldest grandson called me Mike for over a year before the grandpa part came. Now I'm thoroughly enjoying another of my grandkids calling me by my name.
Song(s) of the month: Fairytale of New York by The Pogues and Glen Hansard
The lead singer of The Pogues, Shane MacGowan passed away in 2023 during the holidays. The story of his writing this, now very popular, Christmas song is worthy of your time to read. It finally got recorded in 1987 and became a bit controversial for its profanity and dysfunctional couple. But the music, combined with MacGowan's rough voice and Kirsty MacColl's smooth voice overcomes all of this. Plus, I think this song likely is more reflective of the general population at Christmas time than Chestnuts Roasting on the Open Fire. Most people struggle, most people have relationship problems, and most people are under more stress during the holidays. I've loved this song ever since I first heard it and it's on my "Best Christmas Songs" playlist where I look forward to hearing it every year.
Recently, I came across a version of this song by Glen Hansard, of Falling Slowly fame. Hansard played it at MacGowan's funeral in 2023, right around Christmas time. It's a stunning version, considering the setting in a very formal, old Catholic church in Ireland. Backed by Irish singer Lisa O'Neill along with remaining members of the Pogues, you could feel the mourners wanting to jump out of their seats and dance and celebrate MacGowan's life, rather than sitting nicely in their pews. Eventually they do exactly that. It's incredibly emotional and it's how I would want the celebration of my life to be upon my passing. Check out the original and funeral versions below:
Official video for the original version with Shane MacGowan, The Pogues, and Kirsty MacColl:
Funeral version with Glen Hansard, the remaining Pogues, and Lisa O'Neill:
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami – I’ve read nearly all of Murakami’s works because I love hanging out in his strange worlds that usually include lonely people in search of meaning, lost loves, musical and literary references, strange rooms, portals to different dimensions, an intelligent teenage girl, apartments within walking distance of everything, and cats. Murakami said that the idea for this story was initially published in a magazine in 1980 as he was just starting to hone his skills as a writer. He was not satisfied with the result and tried to fix it in his 1985 novel, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (HBW). That novel won several awards, but Murakami still felt, nearly 40 years later, that he didn’t get it quite right. So he wrote this novel (published in English this year), which has many similarities to HBW, but is completely different in many ways. I’m going to reread HBW to sort them all out.
The novel starts out normally enough, with a 17-year-old boy falling in love with a 16-year-old girl. But then the girl tells him that her true self lives in a city with high walls and that she is merely a shadow of this true self. She tells him that if he goes to that city with high walls, her true self won’t recognize him and that he won’t be able to leave the city because he will need to separate from his shadow in order to enter it. Of course, he somehow mysteriously ends up in that city, but he’s 45 years old by then. His ordinary and lonely life is beautifully described while living in this city. Somehow, he escapes sort of involuntarily and ends up back in the “real” world where he gives up his book distribution job in Tokyo to work in a small library in a small mountain town. There he talks with the ghost of the former librarian and the Yellow Submarine Boy who is an autistic teenager fascinated by this city with high walls. Once again, his mundane life is described in compelling ways until one day he finds a very weird portal between this world and the city with high walls. Boom, he’s back in the city with high walls again and sees the Yellow Submarine Boy but no longer recognizes him. And then it gets crazy. I’ll just stop here because if you’ve read this far, your going “what the hell?” Here are some lines:
Your voice didn’t sound like your voice. It was different from what I remembered. Or maybe every sound and voice in this room took on a different tone.
“Who made this wall?” I asked. “Nobody made it,” said the Gatekeeper, with unshakable conviction. “It was always here, from the very beginning.”
“This gate is the sole entrance to the town,” the Gatekeeper said, pointing a plump finger at the gate. “Once a person passes through and goes inside, they can’t ever go outside again. The wall doesn’t allow it. That’s the rule.”
…all the books on the shelves had been removed, replaced by old dreams.
“Your shadow will pass away before long. When the shadow dies, dark thoughts vanish, too, leaving behind a stillness.”
Rain and gusts of wind lashed the window, like an urgent warning
My shadow paused for a moment, caught his breath, and then spoke. “I think old dreams are like echoes of the minds left behind by real people, people who’ve been banished from the town in order for it to exist. Real people are driven out, but it’s never completely perfect, there’s always something left behind. Those remnants of the mind are gathered together and tightly locked away in special receptacles called old dreams.”
“The town has set up a psychological enclosure of fear around the pool. Which is far more effective than a fence or railing. Once fear takes root in your heart it’s not easy to overcome.”
With a small creaking sound, the reality around me was cracking ever so slightly. Assuming that this was, in fact, reality.
What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might—there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being
I habitually glanced up at the clock. As always, the clock had no hands. It wasn’t a clock that told time, but a clock that showed the meaninglessness of time. Time hadn’t come to a halt, but it had lost any significance.
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami – I decided to reread this book that I initially read many years ago. I wanted to revisit it to see all the similarities and differences between it and Murakami’s latest novel which I reviewed above. As I said in that review, Murakami was unsatisfied with Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (HBW) and it took him nearly 40 years, but he finally rewrote it into the book he wanted. I loved both books, but for me HBW was the more enjoyable and entertaining book. In both novels there exists essentially the same city (it’s a town in HBW) with its high walls, sad unicorns, gatekeeper, and library full of dreams to be read. In HBW the dreams were kept in unicorn skulls, whereas in The City and its Uncertain Walls (CUW) the dreams were stored in egg-like containers. There are a few additional characters in HBW in the town that prove more interesting and make the town come alive a bit more, even though people there still really have no memories or minds of their own. One minor difference is that in CUW the clock tower in the city had no hands, whereas in HBW the clock tower in the town was frozen at 10:35…why? One huge difference is that in CUW the city was created in the minds of the two teenage lovers, whereas in HBW the city was actually a circuit in the protagonist’s brain that became separated from his normal brain circuits after a top secret brain surgery was performed (not unlike the brilliant Apple TV series Severance).
However, the “real” worlds, and the protagonists in the two novels are completely different. The real world in CUW is more muted and nothing much happens beyond the protagonist deciding to leave Tokyo and work in a lonely library in an isolated village. The real world in HBW is far more interesting, with competing spy organizations, underground sewer creatures, brilliant neurosurgeons playing with people’s brain circuitry, and lots of harrowing end of the world escape scenes. Oh yeah, the endings in the two novels are completely different.
I can certainly see the maturity in Murakami’s later novel; there is far less sex and the characters seem a bit more sure of themselves. The worlds in the two novels are still fascinating and I love entering those worlds when I read his novels. But the worlds in HBW are more interesting and more in line with my two favorite Murakami novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84. Here are some lines:
"It’s wrong, I tell you. There’s something wrong with this place. People can’t live without their shadows, and shadows can’t live without people. Yet they’re splitting us apart. I don’t like it. There’s something wrong here.”
You are caught between all that was and all that must be.
Never in my life had I seen such a slim nothing of a figure eat like such a terror. As the cook, I was gratified, and I had to hand it to her—she’d done the job with a certain all-consuming beauty. I was overwhelmed. And maybe a little disgusted.
"Beneath the Pool, there are great halls where the lost wander forever in darkness. I want to know what lies beyond.” She slowly rolls her head, then fixes upon my eyes. “There is no beyond,” she says. “Did you not know? We are at the End of the World. We are here forever.”
...she cannot requite your feelings. This is no fault of anyone. Not yours, not hers. It is nothing you can change, any more than you can turn back the River.
I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.
“So how does all this have anything to do with the world ending?” An innocent question. “Accurately speaking, it isn’t this world. It’s the world in your mind that’s going to end.”
It’s not so strange that when your memories change, the world changes.
“I can tell Bob Dylan in an instant,” she said “It’s like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.” After all the volumes that have been written about Dylan, I had yet to come across such a perfect description. She blushed when I told her that.
She stares at me. No, she stares into the space I occupy.
When have I last heard a song? My body has craved music. I have been so long without music, I have not even known my own hunger. The resonance permeates; the strain eases within me. Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.
I closed my eyes and gave myself over to sleep. Bob Dylan was singing A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, over and over.
North Table Mountain Loop near Golden – I got a bit sick after Thanksgiving, so I was looking for a somewhat mellow hike and this one fit the bill, plus I hadn’t hiked any of the urban trails in Golden before. If you’ve driven by the town before you can’t help but notice this huge mesa hovering over all the residences and businesses in the area. Mesa-tops are always misleading; they look so flat from below, but once you’re up there, it’s like another world of canyons, cliffs, and crevices. Why does it look so flat!? Coffintop Mountain is like that.
There are several different access points up to the top of the mesa, and I used the fairly busy North Table Mountain West Trailhead. There is also a South Table Mountain on the other side of the Golden Freeway, but it doesn’t seem to have as many hikes, plus there is some sort of private training academy up there. The trail starts out fairly steeply gaining 600 feet in less than a mile, but the rest is a series of ups and downs across the mesa. I took a detour to climb to its highest point at Lichen Peak which had some interesting rock formations and nice views. Then it was a counter clockwise walk across the mesa with varying views of the western foothills, the Coors brewery, the Colorado Railroad Museum, and the downtown Denver skyline. The northern portion of the trail was less than stellar so if I did this hike again, I would cut across to the Rim Rock and Mesa Top trails instead. But all the rest of the hike was interesting. I was severely outnumbered today by mountain bikers and trail runners, so I can imagine that weekends would be a bit hectic. But this Wednesday it wasn’t so bad. I totaled around eight miles, and that was about the max my recovering body could take. I did stop at Woody’s Pizza in downtown Golden for a tasty pizza on my drive home. I was so hungry that I burnt the heck out of my tongue with the piping hot pizza, something I used to always do when I worked at Pizza Paisano’s in Albuquerque as a teen.
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| Sun barely peeking over this ridge in winter |
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| Ridge along the north side of the loop |
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| Flatirons in the distance |
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| Downtown Denver out there |
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| Tree and sky |
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| Coors brewing |
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| So many deer up here |
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| Lichen Peak |
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| Mesa top from Lichen Peak |
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| Mesa with Denver far away |
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| Cliffs |
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| Sea Cliffs that is... |
Washington Square by Henry James – James was a prolific author and considered by many to be one of the best English language writers in history. This is the fourth novel of his I’ve read (out of over 20 that he’s written). I previously read Portrait of a Lady (considered by some his best work), The Ambassadors, and Turn of the Screw. I enjoyed all of them for varying reasons. In Washington Square he tells the story of a doctor and his daughter as she reaches the age of marriage in the Washington Square section of New York City. The doctor’s wife and young son died several years earlier, and he and his widowed sister raised his daughter Catherine. The doctor never believed his daughter was all that intelligent or attractive and early on you get the feeling that the guy is not the best father, but Catherine loved and admired him throughout her life. The doctor’s acerbic wit and demeanor weren’t great traits for a father; however, they came in handy when a devious young man came to court her. This young man (Morris Townsend) seemed to have no money, having blown a previous inheritance on trips around the world and failed businesses. Catherine and her aunt however fell for this guy hard and plotted to have them married. But the dad saw right through him and did all in his power to prevent the marriage, including cutting off his daughter’s inheritance. The dialog between the doctor, his daughter, his sister, and the young man was priceless. It’s no wonder so many of the author’s books have been adapted to the big screen. This particular novel was adapted into an opera, a ballet, two plays, and at least three movies that I could find, including the Academy Award winning movie, The Heiress, starring Olivia de Haviland in 1949. Enjoyable read. Here are some lines:
For a man whose trade was to keep people alive, he had certainly done poorly in his own family; and a bright doctor who within three years loses his wife and his little boy should perhaps be prepared to see either his skill or his affection impugned.
He had moments of irritation at having produced a commonplace child, and he even went so far at times as to take a certain satisfaction in the thought that his wife had not lived to find her out.
"He is looking for a position— most earnestly," said Mrs. Penniman. "He hopes every day to find one." "Precisely. He is looking for it here— over there in the front parlour. The position of husband of a weak- minded woman with a large fortune would suit him to perfection!"
What she saw was her father's still grey eye and his clear-cut, definite smile. She contemplated these objects for a moment, and then she looked back at the fire; it was much warmer.
“Your absence of means, of a profession, of visible resources or prospects, places you in a category from which it would be imprudent for me to select a husband for my daughter, who is a weak young woman with a large fortune. In any other capacity I am perfectly prepared to like you. As a son-in-law, I abominate you!"
"And, meanwhile, how is Catherine taking it?" "As she takes everything— as a matter of course." "Doesn't she make a noise? Hasn't she made a scene?" "She is not scenic."
"I have no doubt you are unhappy just now. But it is better to be unhappy for three months and get over it, than for many years and never get over it."
"It is interesting to know that you accuse your only daughter of being the vilest of hypocrites," said Mrs. Almond. "I don't see what difference her being my only daughter makes.”
In the hall he found Mrs. Penniman, fluttered and eager; she appeared to have been hovering there under the irreconcilable promptings of her curiosity and her dignity.
Kohler Mesa – Bear Canyon Loop near Boulder – After my previous hike I got a relapse of whatever evil cold was going around, so I skipped a week of hiking. I decided to get back into it slowly with an easy hike, plus it was really windy on this day, and a winter hike in the mountains in the wind didn’t sound fun. Also, I have been enjoying slowly walking on all the trails in the Boulder Open Space. There are 155 miles of trails in the open space, and I’ve put a pretty good dent in it the past four years, but I have a ways to go. Today I picked a hike that starts in a neighborhood not far from Chautauqua Park. In six miles I basically did a big loop around NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research). This required stitching 6 trails together (Four Pines, Kohler Mesa, Mesa, Bear Canyon, Table Mesa-Bear, and Skunk Canyon), plus a bit of a service road. Saw lots of deer and turkey today, plus great views of the Flatirons and the city of Boulder. There were a few dog walkers and LOTS of trail runners out on this cold and windy day (temps stayed in the 30s with 15-20 mph winds).
Kohler Mesa was named after a family that homesteaded the area in the mid-1800s. The family eventually gave/sold the land to the city. Four Pines was misnamed because there were way more than four pine trees up here. Skunk Canyon was probably named for skunks, but it could also be named for the marijuana smell prominent in Boulder. Today though, Skunk Canyon smelled like methane gas, which was worse than a skunk. Most of the trail was clear of ice except for a few spots on the Mesa Trail where I had to carefully scoot across. We’ve not had any big snowstorms since around Thanksgiving, so the lower trails are drying out.
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| Flatirons from Bear Canyon trail |
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| The very definition of a hill |
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| Turkeys foraging below the cliffs |
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| View from the Mesa Trail |
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| Very titled mesa |
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| Nice flagstone work here in a muddy area |
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| Old cabin near Woods Quarry |
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| Very cool clouds above the Flatirons |
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| Cool clouds above a neighborhood |
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| Walking up to the clouds on Four Pines Trail |
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride – Dangit! Now I’m gonna have to add another author and even more books to my now impossibly long “to read” list. Oh well, worth it! What an amazing novel this was. Somehow Philip Roth and Toni Morrison collided into the mind of James McBride to create a story of immigrant jews and migrated blacks in a small town in Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 30s. I suppose it helped that McBride’s father was African American, and his mother was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. The stories of how people managed their day-to-day lives with so little funds during this time period would have made an interesting novel. But then add the discrimination of the town’s white (non-immigrant) leaders (all dubiously Mayflower descendants), along with the kindest young Jewish woman owner of the title grocery store, her benevolent husband, his well-connected cousin, and a collage of black migrants from the south and Italian immigrants from Europe; then throw in illegal water rights, a cruel asylum and its inhabitants, some of the greatest musical artists of the times, a harrowing escape, and a murder and they all add up to a fascinating story of life in this Pennsylvania town as the Great Depression and Nazi Germany start making their ways into American society.
I pored through this 375-page novel in three days because I just couldn’t put it down. There are so many incredible scenes and story lines. Although the characters are all created in the amazing mind of James McBride, many of the events, musicians, and places were based on reality. The insane asylum (Pennhurst) was a real place with horrific practices that weren’t uncovered until the 1960s. The scenes at the asylum between Dodo, the deaf African American 12-year-old, and Monkey Pants, a 12-year-old cerebral palsy patient, are riveting. And the eggshells that the black community had to walk in their daily lives were as well described as Percival Everett did in James. This book won the Kirkus Prize and the National Jewish Book Award this year. I look forward to reading other works by McBride in the near future. Here are some lines:
The parents, both Bulgarian, were so overjoyed that someone other than a cyclops was willing to marry their disabled daughter – so what if he was Romanian? – they readily agreed.
Nate Timblin was a man who, on paper, had very little. Like most Negroes in America, he lived in a nation with statutes and decrees that consigned him as an equal but not equal, his life bound by a set of rules and regulations in matters of equality that largely did not apply to him. He had no children, no car, no insurance policy, no bank account, no dining room set, no jewelry, no business, no set of keys to anything he owned, and no land. He was a man without a country living in a world of ghosts, for having no country meant no involvement in and not caring for a thing beyond your own heart and head, and ghosts and spirits were the only thing certain in a world where your existence was invisible.
He preferred regular white sliced bread and American sandwiches of ham and cheese which were like everything in America - neat and quick, not fluffy and thick and soupy like old European food.
The Townsends were too bold to live long anyway. They’d been out of the South too long. Too black, too strong, too bold. They refused to step off the sidewalk when a white woman approached; they forgot to avoid looking a white person in the eye. They forgot all the behaviors that, back home, could have you seeing your life flashing before your eyes as a noose was lowered around your neck.
They were alone. And for the first four hours, Monkey Pants gave Dodo a spellbinding, extraordinary performance lecture on the art of survival in one of the oldest and worst mental institutions in the history of the United States.
She was spinning yellow into butter in that barrel when he first wandered into that basement twelve years before with a head full of problems and world full of debt. She was the only one in the world who would remember that first moment.
..the absence of her meant a thousand tomorrows empty of whatever promise they had once held.
“Their illness is not in their minds, or in the color of their skin, or in the despair in their heart, or even in the money that they may or may not have. Their illness is honesty, for they live in a world of lies ruled by those who surrendered all the good things that God gave them for money, living on stolen land, taken from people whose spirits dance all around us like ghosts. I hear the red man hollering and chanting in my dreams sometimes.”
Carter Lake near Berthoud - I've had this hike on my list for a while because it's so close, but I kept delaying because of the $10 entry fee. But I figure, maybe one or two of these high entry fee hikes each year won't break the bank, and the fees actually do go towards helping keep the places in good condition and help pay for folks to keep them in good condition.
Carter Lake is one of 12 reservoirs in the Colorado-Big Thompson Project which diverts water from the Western Slope of the Rockies to the eastern farms and communities along the Front Range. The Project includes hydroelectric plants, transmission lines, and pumps to move the water through tunnels built through the mountains. Initially the project was meant to provide water mainly for agriculture, but the exploding population of the Front Range has meant that the water is now mainly used for residential and business purposes, in addition to agriculture. The Project provides water to communities as far away as Broomfield to the south and Fort Morgan to the east. There are three dams holding back the water at Carter Lake which is 3 miles long and about a mile wide.
The Sundance trail skirts the western shore of the lake and you can access it from either the southern or northern side. I started on the northern end and made my way south along the pretty shore, through pine trees and around long coves. The shoreline is littered with flagstones so I mainly stayed on the trail except for a short portion of the shore that had some sand where I walked a bit off the trail. There are a few signs of fishing along the shore (discarded fishing line and bottles and cans) but it wasn't too bad. I assume it's pretty crowded during the summer, but there were only 10 or so other hikers and trail runners on this winter day. As I reached my car after the hike, the light made for some nice photos of the lake. Then it was a pretty 25 minute drive back home. A nice day outdoors along the water.
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| Nice lighting near the trailhead |
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| Evidence of a fisherman enjoying his day |
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| Southern end trailhead |
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| So much flagstone |
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| Tree line |
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| Natural legos |
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| Lots of coves to walk around |
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| My hopes dashed.... |
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| Lots of angles |
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| Carter Lake |
Until next month, happy reading and rambling!
Song(s) of the month: Fairytale of New York by The Pogues and Glen Hansard
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami – I’ve read nearly all of Murakami’s works because I love hanging out in his strange worlds that usually include lonely people in search of meaning, lost loves, musical and literary references, strange rooms, portals to different dimensions, an intelligent teenage girl, apartments within walking distance of everything, and cats. Murakami said that the idea for this story was initially published in a magazine in 1980 as he was just starting to hone his skills as a writer. He was not satisfied with the result and tried to fix it in his 1985 novel, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (HBW). That novel won several awards, but Murakami still felt, nearly 40 years later, that he didn’t get it quite right. So he wrote this novel (published in English this year), which has many similarities to HBW, but is completely different in many ways. I’m going to reread HBW to sort them all out. 
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami – I decided to reread this book that I initially read many years ago. I wanted to revisit it to see all the similarities and differences between it and Murakami’s latest novel which I reviewed above. As I said in that review, Murakami was unsatisfied with Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (HBW) and it took him nearly 40 years, but he finally rewrote it into the book he wanted. I loved both books, but for me HBW was the more enjoyable and entertaining book. In both novels there exists essentially the same city (it’s a town in HBW) with its high walls, sad unicorns, gatekeeper, and library full of dreams to be read. In HBW the dreams were kept in unicorn skulls, whereas in The City and its Uncertain Walls (CUW) the dreams were stored in egg-like containers. There are a few additional characters in HBW in the town that prove more interesting and make the town come alive a bit more, even though people there still really have no memories or minds of their own. One minor difference is that in CUW the clock tower in the city had no hands, whereas in HBW the clock tower in the town was frozen at 10:35…why? One huge difference is that in CUW the city was created in the minds of the two teenage lovers, whereas in HBW the city was actually a circuit in the protagonist’s brain that became separated from his normal brain circuits after a top secret brain surgery was performed (not unlike the brilliant Apple TV series Severance). 
North Table Mountain Loop near Golden – I got a bit sick after Thanksgiving, so I was looking for a somewhat mellow hike and this one fit the bill, plus I hadn’t hiked any of the urban trails in Golden before. If you’ve driven by the town before you can’t help but notice this huge mesa hovering over all the residences and businesses in the area. Mesa-tops are always misleading; they look so flat from below, but once you’re up there, it’s like another world of canyons, cliffs, and crevices. Why does it look so flat!? Coffintop Mountain is like that.
Washington Square by Henry James – James was a prolific author and considered by many to be one of the best English language writers in history. This is the fourth novel of his I’ve read (out of over 20 that he’s written). I previously read Portrait of a Lady (considered by some his best work), The Ambassadors, and Turn of the Screw. I enjoyed all of them for varying reasons. In Washington Square he tells the story of a doctor and his daughter as she reaches the age of marriage in the Washington Square section of New York City. The doctor’s wife and young son died several years earlier, and he and his widowed sister raised his daughter Catherine. The doctor never believed his daughter was all that intelligent or attractive and early on you get the feeling that the guy is not the best father, but Catherine loved and admired him throughout her life. The doctor’s acerbic wit and demeanor weren’t great traits for a father; however, they came in handy when a devious young man came to court her. This young man (Morris Townsend) seemed to have no money, having blown a previous inheritance on trips around the world and failed businesses. Catherine and her aunt however fell for this guy hard and plotted to have them married. But the dad saw right through him and did all in his power to prevent the marriage, including cutting off his daughter’s inheritance. The dialog between the doctor, his daughter, his sister, and the young man was priceless. It’s no wonder so many of the author’s books have been adapted to the big screen. This particular novel was adapted into an opera, a ballet, two plays, and at least three movies that I could find, including the Academy Award winning movie, The Heiress, starring Olivia de Haviland in 1949. Enjoyable read. Here are some lines: 
Kohler Mesa – Bear Canyon Loop near Boulder – After my previous hike I got a relapse of whatever evil cold was going around, so I skipped a week of hiking. I decided to get back into it slowly with an easy hike, plus it was really windy on this day, and a winter hike in the mountains in the wind didn’t sound fun. Also, I have been enjoying slowly walking on all the trails in the Boulder Open Space. There are 155 miles of trails in the open space, and I’ve put a pretty good dent in it the past four years, but I have a ways to go. Today I picked a hike that starts in a neighborhood not far from Chautauqua Park. In six miles I basically did a big loop around NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research). This required stitching 6 trails together (Four Pines, Kohler Mesa, Mesa, Bear Canyon, Table Mesa-Bear, and Skunk Canyon), plus a bit of a service road. Saw lots of deer and turkey today, plus great views of the Flatirons and the city of Boulder. There were a few dog walkers and LOTS of trail runners out on this cold and windy day (temps stayed in the 30s with 15-20 mph winds). 
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride – Dangit! Now I’m gonna have to add another author and even more books to my now impossibly long “to read” list. Oh well, worth it! What an amazing novel this was. Somehow Philip Roth and Toni Morrison collided into the mind of James McBride to create a story of immigrant jews and migrated blacks in a small town in Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 30s. I suppose it helped that McBride’s father was African American, and his mother was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. The stories of how people managed their day-to-day lives with so little funds during this time period would have made an interesting novel. But then add the discrimination of the town’s white (non-immigrant) leaders (all dubiously Mayflower descendants), along with the kindest young Jewish woman owner of the title grocery store, her benevolent husband, his well-connected cousin, and a collage of black migrants from the south and Italian immigrants from Europe; then throw in illegal water rights, a cruel asylum and its inhabitants, some of the greatest musical artists of the times, a harrowing escape, and a murder and they all add up to a fascinating story of life in this Pennsylvania town as the Great Depression and Nazi Germany start making their ways into American society. 
Carter Lake near Berthoud - I've had this hike on my list for a while because it's so close, but I kept delaying because of the $10 entry fee. But I figure, maybe one or two of these high entry fee hikes each year won't break the bank, and the fees actually do go towards helping keep the places in good condition and help pay for folks to keep them in good condition. 
