Category Archives: Travel

Kate and a wandering Woolly

June 28, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Midsommar Most Heat Moon

Back ouching yesterday, still this morning. Annoying.

Drove the hour out to Denver International to get Kate. Found Scott Simpson with her at the arrival gate. He’s on his way to Carbondale to see his son. We took him to Union Station where he planned to board a Bustang for the rest of his trip. Scott’s reading Homo Deus right now and says it’s rocking his world. Good to see him.

Kate hopped up front after we dropped him off. Well, hopped might be a bit too spry. Moved up front. She looked great, the vacation agreed with her health. She’s a flatlander and a child of the humid east. Her dry mouth was much better in Minnesota and Iowa as was the O2 concentration.

She and Anne drove to Nevada, Iowa, both having reunions, 55th and 50th. They had a good time. On her return to Minneapolis Kate stayed with her long time friend Penny Bond and caught up with her lunch lady friends, Mary Thorpe and Jane West.

Good to have her home.

Colorado, Family, Health, Third Phase, Travel, Weather +Climate

Reunion Weekend

June 25, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Midsommar Most Heat Moon

We had a light frost the other night. The weather has been generally cool since Kate left which is ironic. Friday and yesterday were her 55th reunion, today she drives back to the Twin Cities to stay with longtime friend Penny Bond. Monday the ladies who lunch will gather to include her again while she’s in town.

Kate’s made contact with many Coloradans, at first with the Bailey Patchworkers, then with the Needleworkers and now with Beth Evergreen. During her recent Sjogren’s flare all of these groups expressed concern about her. She’s only been here a couple of years but she has integrated into the community. Good to see.

Jon and the grandkids have walked the Great Sand Dunes, driven to the ancient dwellings at Mesa Verde and will head north to the Dinosaur National Monument before coming home. Jon invited me to come to the Dinosaur National Monument and meet them there, but this is Kate’s reunion weekend and I’m the official dog guy. Otherwise, I’d have done it. It’s one of the many places in Colorado I want to see. It’s a bit unusual in that it is in Colorado and in Utah, following the course of the Green River.

I’ve been speculating about my knee, about how hard I can push it and not have to replace it too soon. Tough since I want to keep my cardio work up. My decision so far has been to privilege my heart over my knee, reasoning that heart health has longer term benefits, but I don’t want to be stupid about it either. Decided last night that I want to see my internist, Lisa Gidday and get some guidance.

Today is mundane: groceries, laundry, groom Kep. Work on reimagining. No workout today. Going back to Sunday as a rest day for now. I prefer to workout, but there’s that nagging thing about the knee. A bit of caution right now.

Humor, Travel

We are a diverse species

May 22, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Rushing Waters Moon

Actual complaints received by the British travel agency, Thomas Cook Holidays:

1. “On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food.”

2. “They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax.”

3. “We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish.”

4. “We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price.”

5. “The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room.”

6. “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow.”

7. “It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallartato close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time — this should be banned.”

8. “No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared.”

9. “Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no egg-slicer in the drawers.”

10. “I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.”

11. “The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun.”

12. “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair.”

13. “I compared the size of our one-bedroom suite to our friends’ three-bedroom and ours was significantly smaller.”

14. “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the resort.’ We’re trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service.”

15. “When we were in Spain, there were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners.”

16. “We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning.”

17. “It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel.”

18. “I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes.”

19. “My fiancée and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”

BE AWARE …

News of the Strange, Politics, Travel, US History

Semiotics. Up Close and Personal.

April 23, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Passover Moon

In a long ago TV program, the name of which I can’t remember, a character said of his Porsche, “It’s my carapace.” Yes. The vehicle we choose is a statement about us, carmakers learned this from the carriage makers. Kate and I drive a Rav4. It’s functional, unexciting, and a mostly serviceable way of moving from point A to point B. We bought it in a hurry when our Tundra had a fatal seizure not long after I’d given the Celica to charity.

But we’ve added a bit to it. First, there’s that damage to the front end, unrepaired. Long unrepaired now, maybe 2 years. That’s a statement. We also have two stickers on the back: Our House Runs On Clean Energy and Fin Del Mundo: Ushuaia. During the presidential campaign, we also had a Bernie Sanders sign. There is a small sticker on the side window for the planetarium in Boulder. Gertie and Rigel ride with us from time to time. Another statement.

fish I mention the Rav4 and the Porsche first because these thoughts often occur to me while I’m driving. Vanity license plates. Fancy wheels. Political bumper stickers. Coexist. Rainbow pride. If you’re going to ride my ass, at least pull my hair. Keep honking I’m reloading. Flagpoles on the back of the pickup: the red white and blue on one side, the yellow, Live Free or Die flag on the other. Gun racks. Lowriders. Bentleys and Priuses. The occasional Maserati or Ferrari. Maybe you’re on a motorcycle wearing colors. Maybe you’re pulling a boat, or a camper, or a horse trailer.

As a culture we have chosen our vehicles as a prominent way to signal to others who we are, or who we would like to be. I read an article that said the political leanings of a particular area could be sussed out by the number of pickup trucks on the road, the more pickups the redder the politics. I’m sure you could find a similar metric by counting Cadillacs or Hummers or expensive sports cars.

I used to have a ponytail and I’ve had a beard almost all of my adult life. Look at a woman’s nails, at earrings, necklaces, bracelets. All semiotics.

evolved At home. Even the dogs with whom we live. Semiotics. Furniture. Art. Books. Rugs and window treatments. Semiotics. Both to others, but also, and often more importantly, to ourselves. Reminders of who we are. Or aspirational signals about who we want to become. Or, false flags, representing how we wish others to see us. The solar panels on our roof. The well maintained exterior of our home. Even the stumps of the trees cut down for fire mitigation. All messages to the world.

We are opaque. Who we are, what we mean in the world, is not evident from our bodies. We want to know, need to know, what others are like, but we’re very poor judges. That’s why stereotyping exists. It attempts to add semiotics to skin color or body shape. Because we want some advance clue as to the nature of the other. Are they are a threat? Are they a potential mate? Might we agree with them on something important? Could they be trusted?

We all know this, at least at a subconscious level, so we offer clues. Those Grateful Dead Dancing Bears. The menorah lit in the window. The stylized fish. The stylized fish with legs and Darwin in the middle. A Bronco’s sticker. A Viking’s sticker. A lacrosse stick. Somehow we feel these things reveal a portion of who we are. Make us less opaque, perhaps a bit more transparent.

As a long ago student of anthropology, these kind of things fascinate me. I offer no conclusions, other than what they reveal about our essential opacity and our desire to be known in spite of it. The wide range of these semiotics are perhaps more necessary in a diverse nation with no tribal traditions, no single ethnic heritage, no long history as, say, Franks or Germans or Spaniards.

Family, Travel

The Wanderer

April 14, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Passover Moon

Brother Mark has been in town for the last couple of days. It was, in some ways, as if I saw him for the first time this visit. His lifestyle is unusual, truly counter cultural. He works at his long time occupation, teaching English as a second language, saves money, then heads off to travel for a few months. Over the last five years or so he’s worked in Saudi Arabia, teaching in Hail, Jubail, Jeddah and a couple of other places I don’t recall right now.

He’s seen every continent except Africa, crossed the old Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a trip he started in Beijing, and worked day labor type jobs when his funds from the teaching ran low. He also makes time to drop in on relatives and friends, staying a while, then moving on. I admire his willingness to live frugally and engage his passion, to see the world. So, a shoutout to Mark, the wanderer.

Politics, Travel, US History, World History

State Sponsored Violence

March 28, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Spring New (Passover) Moon

This disturbing documentary from the New York Times made me remember a long ago lecture on violence by Bob Bryant, my professor of Constructive Theology and my friend.

The gist of the lecture was this, violence exists on a continuum. At one end is extreme trauma meted out by instruments of destruction like bombs and bullets. At the other end of the continuum is violence perpetrated by neglect, by public policy, by omission.

President Duterte of the Philippines bends the continuum into an Ouroboros-like circle where his policy results in extreme trauma. As “I’ll kill you.” gets carried out by police, military and vigilantes, the rule of law, the notion of a system that can make mistakes and must be checked by the courts, gradually dies, too.

It would seem that Duterte is an outlier in both his rhetoric and the results of his policy. Yet consider this. Estimates by policy wonks about the number of people who would die in the USA without Obamacare suggest that approximately 43,000 a year-a year-would die from lack of medical care if ACA had been repealed and replaced by the Republican “plan.”

What Bob Bryant taught me was that the violence continuum was only about means, about tactics. The results are the same. If you die from a vigilante’s bullet in the Philippines, you are no more dead than a young child in the US who dies because they can’t afford an inhaler for asthma.

This is important to understand. It means the healthcare debate, for example, is not only about medicine but also about state sponsored violence. Even the debate about Meals on Wheels and the school lunch program are also about state sponsored violence. Framed in this way the matter is not one for think tanks and ideological purity but one for those who believe compassion and care are marks of a decent society, who believe government exists to serve, not deprive.

Cooking, Family, Travel

Mud Bugs

March 19, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Anniversary Moon

Ruth’s play was in the morning. We drove into Aurora to see it, close to the airport. We came back home, took a nap then went out for the No No’s crawfish boil. Well, I went for the crawfish boil and Kate came along as what the reservation referred to as a non-crawfish eater. We got there early so we saw the waiters put together four tops into single long tables, five of them.

These tables got covered with thin plastic from a roll and the plastic got covered with what I’d expected, newspapers. After we were seated, waiters first brought small plastic containers of fried dill pickles. Wonderful. Next came gloved waiters with metal containers of boiled potatoes and slices of andouille sausage. They simply threw potatoes and sausage slices on the table for each person. Andouille is spicy and a real New Orlean’s treat.

Finally, in the same metal containers came the crawfish, red and spicy from their hot water bath. The waiters tipped the containers over in front of us and small mounds heaped up. The room quieted as we all got to work.

Early in our marriage Kate and I went to New Orleans for a continuing medical education event. It was notable for three reasons. The first and least significant was seeing a grumpy Jerry Lewis pushing a stroller off a plane at the airport. His family looked equally happy.

Having been to New Orleans several times in the years prior to our trip, I wanted to see the area around New Orleans rather than stay in the narrow area of the French Quarter, so I drove out to the bayous. It was April. When I found a bayou that was also a state park, I pulled in, found the boardwalks and walked out into the swampy grassland. Much to my delight and surprise the bayou was full of blooming irises. They were everywhere.

The alligators were just waking up, too. I saw several, moving slowly, trying to get their reptilian blood warmed up. They hunt nutria in this area and there were plenty of these large rodents. The alligators, however, were not up to speed and I witnessed many clumsy attempts by sleepy, cold alligators to catch one. The nutria, far faster than their not yet fully present predators, escaped easily.

The last and most memorable moment of the trip came after I decided to drive around in cajun country and find an authentic cajun restaurant. I found one in a small town somewhere not too far from the bayou. I went in, it was in the middle of the afternoon, and I was the only diner in the place. A waitress came over and I told her I wanted to try some authentic cajun food. What would she recommend?

I don’t recall the other things she brought, but she did bring me a plate of boiled crawfish, fresh from the bayou. And proceeded to peel them and feed them to me. It was odd, intimate and unexpected, but seemed perfectly natural.

As I pinched off the tails of No No’s mounded crawfish and leveraged the meat out of them by breaking the small chitinous bands that held it in, I thought of her, that small restaurant, and all those irises.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Jefferson County, Judaism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Travel

In, but not of

February 24, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

In, but not of. Yesterday at mussar, a spiritual/ethical system within the Jewish tradition, I had a complex moment. We were discussing truth and mercy, the relationship between them. To compare mercy and truth I defined mercy as suspension of judgment. Truth though is a sword and a judgment. If that’s correct, then not all truth is merciful. Rabbi Jamie started to dispute that, but had to leave for his daughter’s wisdom teeth extraction.

In the conversation that followed afterward my use of the sword metaphor was identified as a Christian trope, “I come to not bring peace, but a sword.” I’ve been working very hard over the last year to bracket my mode of theological thinking while absorbing a Jewish style of thinking. This requires effort because though I abandoned Christianity over 30 years ago, my seminary education and professional life as a clergyman reinforced my already strong Judaeo/Christian enculturation. Christianity does still define much of how I think and feel about matters religious and secular.

While that’s obvious, I still felt a flush of embarrassment at being identified with a New Testament informed concept. That flush, as mussar teaches, is an important signal about where growth is necessary.

On the way back up to Shadow Mountain I described my situation to Kate as similar to traveling. “I love to go where the culture is very different from mine, where I’m a stranger. It helps me know my self.” Kate’s journey is one of a Jew deepening her own understanding, her own identity as part of a religious world. My journey is closer to travel, “It feels like I’m traveling on the inside.” In this case no geographic change is necessary for me to be a stranger.

travel

This inner travel exhilarates me, but it also confuses and, in a mild sense, scares me. I’m trying to gain wisdom and personal growth from Beth Evergreen while maintaining my own identity as a pagan. But, not only that. My life as a pagan is not divorced from my enculturation as a Christian. I’m a cultural Christian in many ways. That means I encounter many shocks to my inner world, shocks that wake me up, like a Zen koan, but that also and in the same instance disorient me.

It’s like being on Yaowarat Road in Bangkok on a weekend night. On Friday and Saturday night the sidewalks of Bangkok’s Chinatown, of which Yaowarat is the main street, fill up with small restaurants, often two tables, some chairs and a street vendor style kitchen with a wok, propane tank, utensils and a stack of plates and soup bowls. What food are they serving? I don’t know. I speak neither Thai nor Mandarin. Many people are there who do understand the food offerings, how to eat them, but I’m not one of them. I’m in, but not of the street life. Observing, yes, eager to learn, yes, but even after sampling some food and gaining some insight, I will go back to my hotel, a stranger traveling through.

I’m grateful to the folks at Beth Evergreen and Kate for putting up with my being present as a stranger and an inner traveler. A long journey, barely begun.

Art and Culture, Colorado, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Jefferson County, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Park County, Shadow Mountain, The Move, The West, Third Phase, Travel, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Becoming Coloradan

February 18, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

No snow. 10% humidity. A spate of small wildfires. Result: stage 1 fire restrictions put in place by Jeffco. In February. Winter has gone on holiday and the outlook for summer is fiery if we don’t get more moisture in March and April. Like death, oddly, I find the whole wildfire possibility invigorating. It motivates me to work on our lodgepole pine and aspen and it brings those of us who live in the mountains closer together. A common foe.

Lodgepole pine. From our bedroom window I look out and up to a jagged line of tree tops. On clear nights stars often align with the tops of the pines, giving them a decorated for Christmas look. Sometimes stars also align with branches further down, emphasizing the effect.

Which reminds me. Monday or Tuesday night of this week I looked up at the pines, as I often do before falling asleep. They were lit up with what looked like lightning bugs. What? The phenomena went on for quite a while, small specks of light flashing off and on. Obviously in February and up here on Shadow Mountain, no lightning bugs. A complete mystery.

While waiting on the Rav4 to finish its spa day at Stevinson Toyota I spent some time considering whether I had become a Coloradan yet. First thing. I left my prostate and significant portions of my left knee in Colorado. No flowers in my hair, but I do feel I’ve contributed in a meaningful, whole body sort of way. Then, living in the mountains. Everyday. Learning the rhythms of mountain seasons, the wildlife, the vast number of hikes and sights and sites to see. And we’re adjusted to life at 8,800 feet. A very Colorado and mountain thing.

Of course, there are Jon and Ruth and Gabe, family links to schools, synagogues, sports, life as a child in the Centennial State. Our dogs, too, as Dr. Palmini said, are mountain dogs now. Due to the spate of mountain lion attacks on dogs in the last month or so, I have a concern for their safety that is very Coloradan. In fact I bought a powerful LED flashlight and have my walking stick ready to do battle with a mountain lion if necessary.

Congregation Beth Evergreen, in addition to a religious community, also facilitates ties with people who live up here like the lawyer, Rich Levine, we saw last week. Many others, too. Kate has integrated quickly thanks to the two sewing groups she belongs to: Bailey Patchworkers and the Needlepointers. Her integration helps mine.

The town of Evergreen has many great restaurants, as does Morrison. We go to jazz and theater in Denver.

That’s the coming to Colorado part of the story. The other is my relationship to Minnesota. Of course there are the Wooly friends, especially Tom, Mark and Bill and the docent friends, many of whom I connect with through Facebook, but also through visits, e-mails, the occasional phone call. Those connections are still strong, even though attenuated by distance.

Minnesota will always occupy a large, 40-year space in my heart. That’s a long time, enough to become home. So many memories, good ones and bad ones. But, it is just that now, a 40-year space in my heart. I do not want to return. Life is here, now, and that, more than anything else, tells me that, yes, I have become and am a Coloradan.

Holidays, Travel

Why leave?

February 4, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Often on Facebook I see people taking time off, time away. An article on how to cope with the flood of news now available and clamoring for our attention suggested not reading any news online at all. Read a newspaper and when you finish it, throw it away. Of course, the idea of a vacation is not reserved for hypervigilant news consumers-like me, for instance-but has broad application in the workplace, too.

It’s an interesting notion, vacating something we either enjoy too much or have too much of, regardless of its valence for us. The theory is, of course, that we leave something behind for awhile, don’t interact with it. We distract ourselves by going on a cruise, hopping a plane to another state or another country. We “unplug”, an interesting metaphor, from the internet or from Facebook or Instagram or whatever time eater we’ve grown accustomed to using.

good-for-the-soul I’m a bit suspicious of our motivations. We may be solving the wrong problem. I love travel, seeing new places and becoming a stranger in someone else’s world. I love travel not as a distraction from work or home or the current political climate, but for itself, for the fact of being, literally, somewhere else. It seems to diminish travel, at least as I understand it, to use it as escape. Perhaps the differences here are prepositional. In my sense of travel, I travel to places. In the escapist sense we travel away from something.

When we feel a need to escape a cyber world, a work situation, a too familiar home setting, a relationship, is escape the best answer? I’d say no. The more important question is why do we feel the need to escape? What in the current situation seems so unresolvable that only leaving it behind can help?

Those of us who’ve spent any time in AA meetings know about the notion of geographical escape. Alcoholics often convince themselves that only if they were in a new place, a new job, a new relationship, then their troubles would melt away, vanish. The trouble with the geographical escape is the cliched, but true: Wherever you go, there you are. The you addicted to alcohol travels with you.

chilo Addiction is an overused idea, so I’m not going to talk about Facebook addiction or any other, but the issue in all these instances seems the same as a yearning for geographical escape. Something is not working right now, so I need to go. The problem is, there you are.

In other words distractions like new places, new people, new things to do don’t change your inner life. The first question is, what in me needs to be away from this? Is it that this work just doesn’t fit me anymore? Is it that I’ve worked too hard and become exhausted? Have I read and read and read about other people’s lives while forgetting to be in my own? Have I somehow misused the opportunity that this job or this person or this cyberplace has to offer?

Answering these sort of questions before deciding to vacate makes a lot of sense to me. This is not an anti-vacation diatribe, however. Rather, it is a how you define is how you solve sort of diatribe. Identify the true issue and work on that first. Then, figure out someplace or something you can move towards, travel to the beach or the mountains or Korea or the ballgame, not away from wherever you are.