Category Archives: Travel

Travel

High School Reunion: The Experience

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Fall                                                   Waning Back to School Moon

Ancientrails hits the road again tomorrow morning at 7:30 am via Amtrak to Chicago and points south.  I spend two days in Chicago at the Silversmith Hotel near the Chicago Art Institute.  A few hours wandering the halls of the Art Institute will help me with my Baroque knowledge so I can do two Friends of the MIA tours of our Baroque collection.

 

On Wednesday morning I plan to head out to Hyde Park and the Oriental Museum at the University of Chicago.  Not on many lists to visit in Chicago this museum showcases the phenomenal involvement of the Oriental Institute in near eastern archaeology. “The Oriental Institute Museum is a world-renowned showcase for the history, art, and archaeology of the ancient Near East. The museum displays objects recovered by Oriental Institute excavations in permanent galleries devoted to ancient Egypt, Nubia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, and the ancient site of Megiddo.”  Docents will recognize the winged genius on the right hand wall here.

Hyde Park has attracted me for a long time. My first wife’s brother Bob was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, a rare creature at this primarily graduate university.  When I saw Hyde Park with Bob I did it under the influence, spending a memorable night holed up in the aluminum statue celebrating the splitting of the atom under Alonzo Stagg stadium.  That was back when the University of Chicago still played football.  Enrico Fermi was the scientist.

Later on I visited Hyde Park for several ministry related events and then earned my Doctor of Ministry through McCormick Seminary located in Hyde Park on the periphery of the University of Chicago.  Following that I commuted to Chicago once a month for two years as a student representative on the Seminary’s D.Min. committee.  While there I found and frequented the legendary Jimmy’s, a dark wood, three roomed bar noted for its highbrow clientele.  It’s a great place for a hot dog.

Some jazz, a nice evening meal and I’ll catch the Cardinal to Lafayette.  I’m skipping Indy this time around and renting a car in Lafayette.  This will let me drive through the Indiana countryside in the fall, something I’ve always enjoyed.  While in Alexandria seeing old friends from the class of 1965, I’ll be staying in an unusual location, Camp Chesterfield.  Camp Chesterfield, founded in 1886 as a Spiritualist Church, and now center for Indiana Spiritualists, has an international reputation in the Spiritualist community.

I find it a fascinating sub-culture, an almost straight dose of late 19th century Spiritualism.  They have a hotel on the grounds and I’m booked there for three nights.  I want to take in the flavor of the place from a residential perspective.  I may get a reading or two.

Ancientrails will get updated on the road, but I’m not sure about internet connections, especially at Camp Chesterfield.  They specialize in ethereal connections, ectoplasm.  So, it will be episodic, but look for new entries.  I’ll be back home on October 5th.

Aging, Memories, Travel

Going Home

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Lughnasa                                              Waxing Back To School Moon

Ah, well.  It seems the bug has won.  A cold.  Again.  After two years of relative health, I’ve had three colds in as many months.

My 45th high school reunion, for which I purchased tickets and made hotel reservations a month ago, has shifted a bit.  Early notices said October 2nd, but the bit about homecoming, it turns out now, falls on Friday, October 1st.  I’ll change my plans if I can since riding on the float with the other members of my class was part of the attraction for me.

At the seminary last Thursday night I walked past the Steckel Learning Center to get to the new chapel.  Earlier that day I had seen Clyde Steckel, after whom the seminary named it.  Clyde taught psychology and pastoral counseling.  He’s in the junior docent class that is in training now.  We chatted a bit after the docent luncheon.  Turns out he was in Anderson, Indiana, his home, for his high school reunion just last month.  I’d forgotten he was from Anderson.

His dad worked at Delco Remy and thought, Clyde said, “That it would go on forever.”  Delco made starters and batteries for all the GM cars.  In the 50’s and 60’s Delco and Guide Lamp employed around 25,000 people working 3 shifts.  Now they’re both gone.

There are plenty of chores to get done here before I go, but I have to go into St. Paul right now to hear Leslie preach.

Aging, Dogs, Travel, Weather +Climate

A Kick-Back Day

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Lughnasa                                        Waning Artemis Moon

A fine kick-back watch the blue sky and the white clouds kind of day.  Sunshine.  Not too hot and not too cold.  A late northern summer day or an early northern fall day.  As good as weather gets, anywhere.  We’ve not done much today.  I took Kate out to lunch to thank her for help with the honey extraction.  We took a nap.  I got out our passports so we could see if we needed to update them.  Kate’s is a year out of date; mine’s good until 2018.  Walked the fence line to be sure last night’s barking hadn’t occasioned a digging frenzy on our Rigel’s part.  No.

A college football saturday.  Even though I didn’t and don’t particularly enjoy college football.  Gotta work out.

Family, Travel

Travel Days

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Summer                                          Waxing Grandchildren Moon

As the grandchildren moon waxes, Ruth and Gabe are somewhere south of Andover, headed back home to Denver.  They left about an hour ago taking their parents with 07-12-10_ruth-and-gabethem.  Like most leave takings, this one was bittersweet.  We will not see Ruth’s smile, nor hear her mischievous giggle; the house no longer rings with mymamameee as Gabe, eternally seeking his mother tries to orient himself to the star of his young life.

We will not be able to talk with Jon and Jen about their lives, their joys, the things that matter to them and therefore to us.  The playhouse has lost its enlivener and no one will run up and down the slope in our front yard, shrieking and reveling in the sheer pleasure of walking barefoot in dewy grass.  No uh-oh or banana grabbed and eaten, one half in one  hand one in the other.

There is, too, though the truth of lives disrupted by travel, part of its purpose, but also part of its drain.  The dogs lives changed, and they could not see why.  Everyone’s lives are not at their smoothest because routines become difficult to realize and routine soothes, calms.  So, for Gabe and Ruth, Jon and Jen, they now head back to the garden, to the plans for renovation of their home, to the friends both have made over their years in Denver.  Familiar beds, couches, dogs, food, neighbors.

When Kate and I traveled in Europe, we hit on the idea of a travel day (p.s. Kate reminded me that was her idea.), a day when we just rested, weren’t trying to see some new destination, this museum or that market, this famous street or the Opera House.  This kind of intense, in the home up close visit could, as Kate said, use a travel day.  We’re getting ours today, but when we wake up tomorrow, there will be no mymamameee or Ruth crawling down the hall in her blanket.  And we will miss them.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Health, Memories, Travel, Weather +Climate

Route 66

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Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

Rain beats down and Rigel whines.  We’ve had a couple of dogs with phobias about thunder.  Tira was the most problematic.  She preferred to climb through open car windows in the garage for some reason.  I still have claw marks on the Celica’s leather interior and the Tundra has scratch marks from a frenzied Tira trying to climb the gate closing off the back from the garage and getting hung up, her paws scraping on the hood and her teeth gripping the license plates.  Rigel is not that bad.  Thank god.

Kate’s tired tonight, her muscles aching from a lot of walking and standing.  She’s pushing it, but it’s good.  The doc said no limits, so the more she works it, the faster her muscle tone will firm up and her stamina increase.  Having the hip replaced takes general anesthetic, deep tissue and bone bruising and swelling, so painful  trauma occurs from a bodily point of view, but from a psychic perspective she can tell already that it feels better, way better.

We had our money meeting, discussing the coming of the kids and grandkids next week.  Makes me think of the trips my family used to take from Alexandria, Indiana to Oklahoma City.  Route 66 covered most of the territory, taking us, I remember, right through downtown St. Louis, a bit fearsome for small town folks.  Mom would go in to the motels, inspect their rooms and give them a passing grade or tell us to get back in the car.

Along the way the barns had signs for Meramec Caverns.  Don’t believe I ever saw them.  Sort of the Wall Drug equivalent on Route 66.

There were games involving license plates, 20 questions, word finds and generally gazing out the window as the Illinois, then Missouri landscape rolled by.  I still enjoy that part of traveling, sitting by the window, watching the scenery.  One of the reason I like train travel.

Bees, Family, Humanities, Travel

Staying Inside

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Beltane                        Waxing Planting Moon

Heat exhaustion put an end to my outside work today, so I came in and did Latin.  I’m done with ch. 16 in Wheelock, so I can move on to Ovid.

Kate got her nails done, did some laundry and has organized her packing.  We’ll leave around 9 for the airport.  After I drop  her off, it’s over to the MIA for a lecture on Japanese Samurai Armor and lunch with the docent discussion group folks.

Family, Travel

Expatriate Kin

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Beltane                                       Waxing Planet Moon

Expatriates.  Both my brother (see below) and my sister live the expat life in Southeast Asia, Mary in Singapore and Mark in Bangkok.  I’ve only been over there once, in 2004, for one month, they have both been there over 20 years.  That’s a long time to live in another culture, to live politically disenfranchised from the community in which you work and have your home, to live in a place where the familiar cues of home are either non-existent, weakened or have a different meanings, to live far from the places where you grew up and the people you knew then, including family.

On the other hand it gives you an opportunity without parallel to become a global citizen, to take in the lifeways of persons whose basic assumptions about life are different than your own.  It gives you a chance, if you take it, to get to know yourself much better, for the you that you are stands out in bold relief in places radically different from your own.

It exposes you to the kind of danger Mark experienced over the last few weeks when his host country, a place he lives in because he loves it there, turns feral.  Not only that, the wild citizens set up the zoo right outside his soi.  Scary.

The expat life interests me, but I view it from a distance.  The closest I come to it is the life of a Hoosier in the Gopher State.  Sometimes it can come pretty close to that expat feeling, except I felt like an expat in Indiana, never in Minnesota.  Except when they crank up the music for hockey or start hauling those ice-fishing houses out.  Then, I feel a bit lost.

Aging, Travel

Life Is a Cabaret

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Spring                                                         Awakening Moon

When we drove over to our financial consultant this morning, I looked up and saw a crescent Awakening moon tucked in behind three wispy rows of cirrus clouds.  The moon, faint and slightly out of place, added a moment of mystery.

It was an omen.  Ever had a really pleasant surprise?  I had one, Kate and I had one this morning.  We sat down with Ruth, our consultant, and began going over this and that as we always do.  She got caught up on matters personal and physical like Kate’s back surgery and asked questions about Kate’s impending retirement at the first of next year.  That was why we were there, to make sure about our resources after Kate leaves full time medicine.

We tossed ideas around and looked at a 2011 budget Kate and I did last week.  It was,  in my view, tight but manageable.   Ruth made a comment about the amount of money we had coming in from social security and pensions and then how much more we needed from money in Kate’s retirement account.  Wait?  What was that?

We add the money from the retirement account to the social security and the pension?  My mind went blank for a minute as parts of me processed what this meant.  It meant I’d viewed our post-retirement budget from a very restricted perspective.  I had, for reasons I no longer understand, folded the our social security and pension payments into the total from the retirement account rather than adding them all together.  This means our available cash after Kate retires just went up by about 50%!  50% is a big number.  That means our budget goes from being adequate to pretty damned good.

A pleasant surprise, indeed.

Afterward, we ate lunch at Spoonriver, Brenda Langston’s place by the Guthrie.  I saw Brenda there and complimented her on her class and the restaurant.  It was a great, healthy and damned expensive lunch.  But, what the hell?  We can afford it.

Bees, Great Work, Travel

Mid-Session, Mid-March

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Imbolc                                           Waxing Awakening Moon

A sunny, bright day, but cooler.  44 right now.  Temps will trend downward over the next week toward more normal March weather.  This week we’ve melted all of our snow away, unusual.

Put in a large order at Mann’s bee supplies for deep hive boxes, honey supers, frames and foundations, hive tools, feeders and pollen patty mix.  Kate’s taken over the woodenware phase of the process, agreeing to put stuff together as it comes.  This is great for me since handling such matters tends toward large amounts of frustration and blue language.

Spent yesterday AM doing travel arrangements for Kate’s trip to Denver (car) and her trip to San Francisco (air), writing our CPA, signing up for a healthy eating class from Brenda Langston and moving money around.  A fussy, businessy day with our business meeting in the AM.

The mid-session for the Sierra Club Legislative Committee finds us fighting defense on the Nuclear Moratorium and the Polymet Mining proposal, pushing a few bills, but, for the most part, working in the trenches.  An old flame of mine, now a tax staffer for the Minnesota Senate used to say “No one’s wallet or rights are safe while the legislature is in session.”  That emphasizes the need for constant surveillance as bills go into committees, especially after Friday, the 2nd deadline which winnows legislation down further.  As bills miss deadlines, authors begin to look for creative ways of pushing their legislation like getting it added to omnibus bills or arranging for amendments once a bill is on the floor of either house.

Today is a day for Liberal II:  Liberalism-the present (and, I think, the future since I have no slot this year to finish a trilogy.)  Research all day.  Writing starting over the weekend perhaps.  So I’d best get to it.  Later.

Art and Culture, Family, Travel

Leaving Denver

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Winter                          Waxing Cold Moon

The decompression has begun.  My suitcase awaits only my dopp kit to be ready to go.  A shower, final packing and I’ll be ready.  Ready, that is, to drop off the rental car before noon then spend three hours at the Denver Airport before my 3:00 pm flight back to the Twin Cities.  When I arrrive around 5:45, I’ll still have one more leg to go:  Super Shuttle, in a ride on which I will be the last one delivered home.  All in all it will probably be between 7 and 8 hours before I get home after leaving the hotel.

I’m reading a book called Stealing the Mona Lisa, discussing it comes next, at a gathering of docents, dining at the Namaste Restaurant.  I would describe it as a difficult book, written by a psychoanalyst for whom style seems an afterthought and clarity a bother.  Having said that though, it is a profound book, digging deep into the meaning of art and, surprisingly, into the meaning of art’s absence.

Why I mention it this morning is an aha from the section I read over breakfast.  In describing psychoanalytical attitudes toward drives the author, Darian Leader, makes clear that sublimation is NOT a replacement for the act of sex, fucking as he so baldly puts it, rather it is an expression of the individuals need to fulfill the same desire as sex fulfills, that is, in Freudian terms, a return to the pleasure of direct bodily manipulation, pleasures lost as we adapt to cultural definitions of who and what we are.

Also, and most interesting to me, for Lacan, drives are an attempt to get to the state Freud describes as pleasuring the body, but Lacan describes as The Thing, a vast emptiness that exists just outside our capacity to reach.  Therefore our drives are attempts not to fill this emptiness, but to reach it, to find it, to discover what was lost when we became creatures of culture.

Lacan’s emphasis on emptiness as the defining state for our humanness, and as a state forever beyond our reach, yet felt and desired in every moment, struck me as a link to both existentialism on the one hand and Taoism on the other.

In existentialism we admit the reality of this emptiness, admit it’s definition of life as meaningless, then proceed to construct our life both in spite of and because of this emptiness.

In Taoism, we recognize the creation of the universe to have come from emptiness, the Tao, and we also recognize it as a vivifying impulse behind each moment.  It may be that Lacan’s more tortured and dark view of emptiness as The Thing exactly misses Taoism’s great point about emptiness as the very reason for a door, a cup, a vase.

There is, too, one other important thread that I don’t find so far in the book and that the is the realm of rationalist philosophy.  In this idea we construct our reality through sensory data, but our sensory data is not reality in the same way that a map is not the territory.  This means, according to Kant, that we can never know reality, the ding an siche, the thing-in-itself.  Sounds pretty Lacanian to me.