Sidetracked Charley

I remember my father talking of how times were different when he grew up and the miles he had to walk through snow and rain to school. He and my mother lived through WWII and the Great Depression. And if we whined about wanting something they could not afford in our youth he always said, "You do not know how good you have it." But I remember the hard times too like when I was sent to the market with two dollars to buy bread and milk and lost it. Dad was away and payday was obviously not until he got home. We only had one car and Dad had it on the road. I was in the third grade and walked to school with Barbara and Janet who lived down the block. My brother was not in school yet and my sister not yet a thought as Dad would say. That was El Paso, Texas, with its gas refineries spewing sulfur out of the stacks. We lived at the end of the runway of Ft. Bliss. Not my first airbase. But the first where houses were at the end of the runway instead of the side. The jets bare...

Heading West There comes a point in every journey where the conscious person realizes it is not about the destination. As we left Las Vegas bound to drop Barb-from-Santa-Barbara off in Barstow I felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass. Penny had shotgun and I tried to sleep. I had not slept since before my last final, four hours before our departure. The trip could no longer be counted in hours but in images and flashing across my memory like slides shown in the backyard. Slides were after film and before digital. Dad was an avid recorder of our family adventures. He gave me a Kodak camera when I was eight and his Rolex when I went off to college. For some reason I left it back at the dorm as if this forbidden escape should not be recorded except in my mind. It it was. Each image recorded like a power point presentation with a caption. "Why Barstow?", I asked Barb as we got her bags out of the trunk at the railroad station there. "Because we moved here." ...

Hoover Dam before 2010 and the bridge I had never been further west on Route 66 than Flagstaff, Arizona the summer I graduated from high school. Dad took the family on the grand tour of National parks in the four corners area. All other vacations had been to visit family in Missouri at Christmas, or fishing trips in Colorado. Now I was hitch hiking with a Playboy bunny from Chicago and three other class mates who had been rewarded with summers in Europe after prep school graduation. I grabbed shotgun. And they climbed in the back to get some sleep. Riding shotgun, my pilot father used to explain, is a lot like being co-pilot and navigator; duties I was more than willing to fill because I could see the entire panorama of the scenery before us. It also meant keeping the driver awake and engaged. So I knew more about Charley, our host, than the others by the time we got to Hoover Dam. Charley was the first man I had met outside my high school English teacher who did not look at me ...

Welcome to Kingman Get Your Kicks on Route 66 Actually to be precise the Buick did not blow up in Kingman, Arizona but outside of Kingman. That particular day we saw Kingman three times. When we drove into the town on Route 66 just before dawn the car was knocking, and we again needed gas. Fortunately this time a station was open. There was no self serve in those days except for illegally siphoning it. You pulled in, waited for a gas jockey to make it out to your car, said fill it up with regular, and check the oil. Then we all made a dash for the bathrooms. They were always gross. But in the Route 66 days there were no rest stops with or without facilities. The attendant said the Buick was two quarts low. He added oil and some STP oil treatment stuff in case we had a crankshaft leak. The Buick was a year old and had just been serviced by the dealer in Albuquerque. We were all a bit road weary. Nobody questioned the information until the first long steep hill on the Califo...

Map of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley After my father got out of the military we settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I can remember being really upset when after a couple of years there and we didn't move. Military children are used to moving. As I remember we lived in three different states in the second grade. One was a base in Roswell, New Mexico and my first look at mountains. Then it was Missouri again and El Paso, Texas. Most of my truest friends were dogs and books. And after leaving Roswell I missed the mountains more than my school mates. So Albuquerque, I thought, would be just another temporary stop and I was quite upset when I was informed by my parents we were staying. I was a freshman in college before they moved again. And they left me behind in the dorm. Dad used to joke, after a couple drinks, that they could not get me to run away from home so they ran away from me. My family are elephants. They never forget what they think is an amusing story. I neve...

I went through a major sea change in my mid forties. I think it was do that or die. And it was not one of those over night changes. But it began there in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on the eve of moving in with John. And it continued through my short marriage and long divorce from him, the death of my father, and then my mother. I had through this time a quote on my refrigerators, (there were several-a different frigs - one for each move): If I don't manage to fly, someone else will. The spirit wants only that there be flying. As to who happens to do it, She has only a passing interest. Rainer Maria Rilke In truth it was several prints of this quote because I kept wearing them out. But the computer had entered my life about the same time frame so I could always print another. It was an era of quotes for me. I noted them down in my journals, wrote them on my mirror with eyeliner pencil, pasted them on the dashboard of my car. But this was the one which was not a passing fa...

Thicke and Quentin A lot of people my age are shedding their pets or at a minimum not replacing them. Yes, they may well out live me but what would live be without them. And the good news is more people are adopting older pets. Cats and dogs whose owners moved on or just into a care facility. I imagine a time when senior homes are more open to letting pets come too. Admittedly not two dogs and three cats like at my house. But when I look back over my pet history not many lived to the full extent of their lives. Yes, Mariah made it to 14. Which for a German Shepherd I full expected to die at nine was extraordinary. But her puppy, Maddy, developed a virulent and aggressive spinal cancer at five. It took me a month to come to terms with having to let her go. Other dogs fell from one cause or another around five to 8. But my standard poodle is now 15 and a half. The grand dame of canines. Magique, my labradoodle, is 11.  She will really miss Mardi and so in part the kittens are ...

Mardi Gras and Magique Sometimes you do not know how out of balance your life is until you cannot stand it any more. It isn't always the big things. Sometimes it is an accumulation of a bunch of little things that do not get better. And sometimes it is us humans which are the last to see it. Since I took Wolfie back to his house to care for him there an interesting change has come about in my household. First was that Willow immediately accepted the kittens. Two was that the kittens immediately expanded into the entire house and stopped hiding in the corner. And three was that Mardi got better. Mardi is 15 and a half now. I have been treating her with vitamins for a liver ailment for a couple years, and the last couple of winters I have wondered if this will be her last. This one really felt like it. I had a difficult time getting her to join in with the morning walks. They were short walks because I was trying to teach Wolfie to walk right on a leash. Mardi always hung ba...

Rural Route Boxes When ski season is over there is something so absolutely wonderful about hitting the local routes. My favorite is down 434 to Las Vegas, the most meditative is 64 to Raton, but the most frequently taken is 64 to Taos. It is a winding path over Palo Fechado pass and I have taken it often enough I think I could do it in my sleep if it was not for all the crosses beside the road where someone tried that and failed. I do go on auto pilot. Part of my mind is accessing the quality of light and whether it would benefit me to pull over and take the shot. Camera is almost always in the car. Part of me is making amendments to the shopping list and another coming up with posts for FaceBook if I dared text while driving. There is always the blog I will write when I get home. I think I was unduly influenced by And to Think I saw it All on Mulberry Street  by Dr. Seuss first published in 1937 would you believe. Long before I was born and even longer before I started read...

April 4th Sunrise My sister and I were chatting this morning about what Easter is to us. She was the last of the excessive real Easter Egg hunters. Dad said she wore the eggs wanting her older siblings to constantly hide them again and again. And then about a month later there was the tell tale odor of the missed egg. So more Easter bunny and eggs and parks than churches. Spring was also the first camping and fishing trips because the ice had melted. And it was the sunrise camp services given at various state and national parks. And the one at Red Rocks in Colorado where the sun never showed while it snowed almost 18 inches. It was one of the first major snow storms I had ever driven through. Easter is sunrise and snow. My spiritual church is the outdoors. Those things men build are just ways to shut out my spiritual connection. So I decided today I would post some of the photographs from last year which mean renewal for me. Last Easter I was facing blindness in my r...

Kittens on the window sill Transitions are never easy in life. There is something about the human animal which is happiest when change is not required. Probably why people go to Florida where there are not even seasons to consider. I love spring generally but no sooner had Thicke and Quent come into my life and the weather turned awful. I could not even go out to the garden to escape their antics. If, as an older person, you have no memory of kittens let me say they are educational and entertaining. I can now identify the sounds for approximately 100 different items being knocked over or pushed off of something. Including the television set. Which let to the new use for duck tape which comes in several colors and decorator patterns. Knowing what was pushed off helps you deduce what it was pushed off of.  I have decided kittens are a mental training program. Latest technical upgrade also available for computer screens Taking care of a friend's kitten led to the dis...