Monthly Archives: January 2011

Aging, Family, Retirement

Live From the Front Range

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Winter                                                   Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Ancientrails hits the road tomorrow, coming to you cyberlive from Denver, Colorado in the new and rapidly expanding area around the old Stapleton Airport.  There will be wonderful grandchildren stories, important updates on children and a report on the interior of the Denver Mint.  Don’t miss anything.  Especially those grandchildren stories.  I can already tell you how they begin:  Ruth is the most amazing 4 year old I’ve ever known and here’s why.  Same for Gabe only 2 year olds.

We’ll be there a week, the newly liberated Kate and the still liberated me, easing in to this new full-time togetherness thing.  We took a reluctant Vega and Rigel, along with old hand Kona, over to Armstrong Kennels.  Like always, once they got out of the truck and into the lobby, ok, the entry area, they started sniffing around and seemed quite alright with us leaving.  So we did.

Lunch at Azteca which was on the way home, a nap, a business meeting.  This had good news.  Our finances are in the best shape they’ve been in since ever.  A propitious moment at which to retire.  We sorted through the various tasks remaining before Kate’s big party on the 20th, considered the positive news of Kate’s retirement again, and finished.

I’ve been putzing around on various computer related matters since then.  I’ve managed to create or acquire three nagging problems, ones I’ve not been able to fix and it annoys me, but we’re leaving tomorrow and they will wait until we get back.  Fortunately, my netbook, which travels with me, isn’t one of them.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Retirement

Homecoming

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Winter                                                                    Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

I’m sitting here, waiting on Kate to come home from her retirement party at work.  It’s at an Applebees, noisy and with people I don’t know so I stayed home.  With my hearing loss a noisy room makes a party, not my favorite place to begin with, much worse.  Since we’ve never found anything to help my unilateral hearing loss, it’s important to know my limitations.  Still, I miss being with her right now, though our work places have always been separate.  A doctor can’t take her husband to work with her so he can see what she does.  As a result, I’ve not hung out there, gotten to know her colleagues.  We did go to group events in the first years, but those long ago petered out as the corporate side of medicine fragmented the docs.

Kate came home while I was writing this.  She had a wonderful evening out and received several gifts, including a pricey bottle of champagne.  Which, of course, I can’t help her with.  Darn.  Excitement still radiated from her polished, sprinkled fingernails to her equally polished and twinkly toes.  Now she’s up and we’re getting ready to take Vega, Rigel and Kona over to Armstrong Kennels, their home away from us while we fly to Denver.

Guess what?  5-10 inches of snow predicted for Denver on the day we arrive.  Oh, joy.  The good news is it will be 25 degrees warmer than home at 26.

Today is a get ready to travel day.  Stuff to do.  Talk to you later.

Aging, Family, Health, Retirement, Travel

Giddy Kate

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Winter                                                               Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

A very floaty, giddy Kate rode with me back to her truck at the Hair Salon, then climbed in the green Tundra and drove off for her final night of full time medicine.  This is one happy chippy.  Fun to see her so excited.

Before that we went out to lunch at a favorite spot, a sushi place on old Hwy. 10, Takaido.  Not sure what the deal is, but the inside of the place offered little more than shelter against the wind.  It was cold.  I wanted sushi, but couldn’t imagine it in that chilly a space so I got salmon teryiaki with kani in bento box.  The hot tea warmed my hands and the restaurant slowly warmed to bearable.  They took over a fast food building and the outer walls around the dining area are glass and thin masonry.  Brrrr.

The Spectacle Shoppe called and said our glasses had come in, that’s why we were in that part of town.  This place has a really interesting collection of frames.  The owner has a quirky aesthetic, one that I like and so does Kate.  We’ve bought our last several pairs of glasses there, utilizing left over money in our flex-med account.  This is a big source of business for these folks; they even have a $75 off deal for folks using up their flex dollars.

All of Kate’s glasses were done; she had new lenses put in old pairs and bought a pair of new prescription sunglasses.  Aha.  She can see faraway now.  Good for driving.  My reading glasses were done, but new tortoise shell round frames were still waiting on their lenses.  I’ll have to go after we get back from vacation.

As to vacation.  In spite of the fact that we’re going to Denver, I find myself in an oddly sedentary mode.  Wish I could just flash there and flash back, not go through the whole airport rigmarole.  Why I like the train.  But, the timing on this one ruled out the train.l

Friends, Politics, Retirement, US History

Never Ending Terror

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Winter                                                                 Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

The big day has arrived.  Kate’s last shift.  She’s off right now getting her nails done–her constant scrubbing in and out of rooms made fancy nails silly–and her toes, since she wears sandals almost all year round.  This way she’s dolled up for tonight and for the next week in Colorado.

Back a bit I bought a print by a Minnesota artist, Mike Elko.  It hangs to the right of this computer and looking at it right now triggered a major aha.  The print is the faux cover of a magazine, Practical Paranoia.  It features a cartoon woman with sixties hairdo and clothing, a tear trickling down her face and this copy next to her:  He keeps saying, “If you question me, then the terrorists have won!”  Is all of this really necessary or is he just trying to make me crazy?  I live in…

NEVER ENDING  TERROR!

A Bush era piece, I bought it in part as a lest we forget, a cautionary tale about government gone loony.  As I looked at it right now, I realized a huge difference, a huge positive difference between the Bush and the Obama eras.  We don’t feel this way anymore.  There is no longer the Cheney–Rumsfeld–Bolton–Wolfowitz–Kristol nexus, a sort of demented nerve ganglia that twitched and pulsed cries of alarm at every shadow.  Obama has calmed us as a nation while continuing to actively pursue terrorists, and a sober analysis of the Bush methods.

General

A Peculiar Place

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Winter                                                                  Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

The last Thaw tours are over and they were good ones.  I’m glad I leave the exhibit with a positive feeling.   This art, important and beautiful as many of its pieces are, doesn’t engage my heart in the same way European and Asian art does.  Individual pieces and cultures do, but not all of it, though I suppose that’s really not too different from the rest.  This was an opportunity to see and become familiar with some remarkable objects from an unusually broad and deep collection.  If I’m ever in Cooperstown, I’ll stop in to see the rest.

The museum is such a peculiar place, bricks and mortar, bureaucracy and guards, elitist opinion all woven around the true stars, mind bending, heart wrenching, beautiful, disturbing works from all over the world.  Many of the works are old friends now, The Cardinal, the Man of Sorrows, Germanicus, Doryphoros, Song dynasty ceramics, the collection of Chinese paintings, the Tea House and the tea wares, the ukiyo-e prints, the Benin head and the Bierstadt, Moran and Copley American paintings.  Dr. Arrieta.  The Delacroix, the Cezanne, the Monet.  Kandinsky.  the tryptych Blind Man’s Buff.  the Bryce Marsden.  The strange and disturbing telegraph operator.

When I come into the presence of these and many other pieces, we pick up things where we left off the last time I visited.  Hello, Cardinal.  You’re looking serious today.  Does Jerome bother you or does he give you inspiration?  Mr. Marsden, are you there behind the surface, the paintedness?   You gods, the jam session must have been a good one, you look exhausted.  Yes, your colors still move me today as they did they last time, Mr. Kandinsky.

Do you ever wonder what the paintings and the sculpture think after the lights have gone out and all the art lovers have gone home?  Many of them are, after all, of vampiric age.  Lucretia is a spry 345.  The Jade Mountain 225.  Doryphoros?  2,100 years young.  A real antidote to that sinking feeling when you turn 64.  As, for example, I will do next month.  Over all those years they must have accreted some wisdom, some knowing.  Think of all things they’ve been around for.  To be in their presence is to inhale the passage of not just days or months or years, but centuries and millennia. As I said, the museum is a peculiar place.

Aging, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Retirement, Weather +Climate

The Cold Month

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Winter                                                                       Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

Sunlight has begun to grow, but as is often the case here in January, the snow keeps the air near the ground cold and the amount of light increase will not begin to warm us until February, though by then the train will have left the station for winter.   It’s days then will, again, be numbered by rising temperatures, melting ice and corners in the city where cars on intersecting streets can be seen again.  But not now, not January.  This is the Cold Month.

Kate’s next to last day at full time work.  Her friends at work will take her out to Applebee’s tomorrow night after the shift ends at the Urgent Care.  Afterward she will come home and we’ll sit together a bit, listening to music or watching a recorded TV program, the last time we’ll play out this late night ritual save for the occasional, 4 0r 5, nights she’ll work a month for the next couple of years.

Vega and Rigel will go to Armstrong kennels for the first time since they came to live here.  They’re pretty flexible dogs so I’m sure they’ll have a good time.  All of our dogs have liked it there.  Emma, our eldest whippet who died last year, loved the kennel, eagerly whining and straining to get inside.

My friend’s wife has chosen a hormonal treatment for her adenocarcinoma.  They’ll go with that and see what results they get, if the tumors shrink.  Again, if you have a quiet moment and can remember her and her family, they would appreciate it.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Weather +Climate, Writing

Gut Check

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Winter                                                                    New Moon of the Cold Month

Last Monday night I ate dinner with my friends, six of them, at a restaurant, the Bukhara, which carries on the Mughal influenced culinary tradition of Northern India.  On the way home I got a gut check on my world view.  There was a light snow, the temperature hung at zero and the lights of other cars and trucks reflected off melted water on the highway as I headed toward Coon Rapids.

Near the intersection of 494 and Rockford Road some part of me, a deep part, reached up and said, your friend’s wife may die.  That part went on, speaking in images and feelings as the deepest parts of us do.  The reflected highway, a skidding truck, my death.  What then, Charlie, it asked?  What then?  Another aspect of my Self, perhaps even the same part asking the question, raised up an image from an old movie about Rome, The Fall of The Roman Empire.  Why?  What?  Oh.  Alec Guiness.  Marcus Aurelius.  A principled man, a Caesar, a Stoic.  The author of the Meditations.

How did this relate?  The epitaph.  Reported as the most popular of ancient Rome:  I was not.  I was.  I am not.  I don’t care.  Stoicism and a principled approach to this life.  Cast aside the final, eternal question.  Unanswerable.  Unknown.  Most likely unknowable.  Still act.  Still live.  Still care.

The windshield washers snicked, dirty water thrown up by vehicles in front of me cleared and I was back on the highway, headed toward 694.  And I knew.  Yes.  The deepest part of me knew, too.  Yes.  This life.  For all I’ve got.  This one.

Great Work, Minnesota, Politics

The Funny Season

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Winter                                                              New Moon of the Cold Month

The funny season is off and running.  Expect next week:  introduction of a repeal the nuclear moratorium bill in the House.  Later, the same for the coal moratorium.  A lobbyist I talked to today spoke of sticking his head in a new legislator’s office, “He was sitting behind his desk.  Not a piece of paper on it.”  That will change, but it gives you an idea of how new many of this year’s legislators are.

Much will be said and written over the next few months, but here’s a key thing to look for:  the stability and cohesiveness of the DFL caucus in both houses of the legislature.

I feel privileged, at this age, to be in the thick of this stuff on behalf of our great outdoors, our lakes, rivers and streams, our ongoing commitment to natural heritage all Minnesotans know and love.  This morning a chance that old work, community based economic development, might be relevant to this ongoing struggle emerged.  I hope so.  We lose so many votes over the perceived contradiction between jobs and protection of our natural heritage for our kids.  This is a false choice, but we need to be more proactive in showing that it is.  We need to become leaders in community based, eco-friendly economic development.

A busy, political day.  Satisfying.

Family, Travel

Wanderers

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Winter                                                                  New Moon of the Cold Month

My brother, Mark, is a traveler, a wanderer, a planet.  He can’t sit still, a powerful urge to move comes over him, an urge with plenty of family reinforcement.  Dad took to the road all the time, as often as he could, as long as he could, even if it was to run down the story of a river that went underground only to pop up somewhere else.  He hunted down the ordinary extraordinary.  Mark takes the sensibility a step further.

He has crossed Russia on the trans-siberian railway, picked olives in Turkey and worked on a kibbutz in Israel.  When he finally hit Southeast Asia, over twenty years ago, something clicked.  This was a place he could use as a base.  And he does.  Teaching English in Bangkok, but setting out for journeys into Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam.  He reminds me of the writers who took off on tramp steamers to see the world.  Now, he’s antsy again, wanting to move, needing to move.  Who knows where he’ll go next?  He doesn’t.

Mary, my sister, travels a lot, too:  Tibet, India, Dubai, the Caribbean, England, Greece, Malaysia, Indonesia.  She, too, has a base in Southeast Asia, Singapore, or Asia Lite as she likes to call it.  She teaches, too, at the National Institute of Education, Singapore.

They both have lives that are very exotic compared to Andover, Minnesota.  I’m glad to have their vicarious adventures in my life.

Aging, Bees, Health, Humanities

Keep That Gray Matter Working

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Winter                                                            New Moon of the Cold Month

Geez.  I felt affirmed by this paragraph in a longer article by Oliver Sacks.

Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness.

Oliver Sacks is the author of “The Mind’s Eye.”