Impressions of Myanmar (Burma)

Flying from Bangkok to Mandalay was a jump back in time.  The airport in Mandalay is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of fields, with none of the development that surrounds other airports.  The airport was clean and efficient, lethargic and empty.  Ours was the only airplane that I saw.

There’s no bay in Mandalay, which is a hot, dirty, sleepy little town many miles from the ocean.  The buildings are mostly two to four story blocks; Chinese functional architecture.  I didn't see any interesting examples of older European buildings.  Our hotel was surprisingly nice and the staff worked hard to make us feel at home.  We ate at some local restaurants a block or two from the hotel, and the food was OK, not bad but not memorable.

We visited the Palace where the last king of Burma lived until he was defeated by the British,  The walls were wood but the roof was sheet metal giving an overall surreal feeling, and the grass looked as if it had not been mowed for some time.  At sunset we went to the top of Mandalay hill, climbing some 1800 steps under cover all the way.  The view at the top was stunning.

A small bus took us to Bagan over roads that varied from new highway to an almost non existent track through a shallow river.  I saw many carts pulled by oxen along the way, and the restaurant we stopped at for lunch was little more than an open building with a dirt floor and some plastic tables.  In contrast, our hotel in Bagan was very nice and even had a beautiful garden and pool.

The pagodas and temples in Bagan - there are thousands of them - are spread out over a large area.  We hired a driver with a horse cart, a two wheeled device with a padded platform to sit on, and saw several sites.  It is a dry rather barren area that is beautiful at sunset, and I took some nice pictures,  I was told that Bagan at sunrise is also beautiful.  There were a  large number of tourists from all over the world at Bagan and several large signs urging everyone to dispose of their garbage properly and to ‘Warmly Welcome and Take Care of Tourists.’

We returned from Bagan to Mandalay  by the same small bus, a five hour trip, and then rode  thirteen hours by big bus to Moulemein, a surreal trip with stops every two hours throughout the night.  Moulemein is a small sluggish city on the ocean with some interesting architecture.  We had one great meal in a small restaurant on the bay of fresh seafood.

The VIP bus we took from Moulemein to Yangon was wonderful, a big Chinese thing with only two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other.  There were thirty seats altogether and one ticket was 10,000 kyat - about 10 USD.  The TV monitors on the back of the seats worked and we watched the Fifth Element with Bruce Willis.

Yangon is the largest city in Myanmar, and it has an area near the waterfront of interesting old buildings that are in an unfortunate state of decay with plants growing out of the facades.  It feels as if the city has been asleep for fifty years and just woke up to a state of disbelief.  There are huge development projects under way, but I didn’t see a single US company represented there; no McDonalds, no Starbucks, no Subway.  We rode on the train that circles the city, a three hour trip, and except for our digital cameras it could have been 1954 as easily as 2014.  We had a good dinner at Junior Duck, a Chinese restaurant overlooking the river.  We drank cold Myanmar beer and watched the sunset, then ate stir fried seafood in the open air second floor balcony area.

My overall impression of Myanmar?  Nice people (mostly) who seem very religious; poor infrastructure; minimal development.. 

Yangon

An Office in a Temple

A Temple in Bagan

Bagan, Myanmar

Pa-Auk Forest Monastery and Meditation Center

" You will suffer."

These words of encouragement came from the  Abbott after listening to my answers to his few brief questions:  ” Do you want to learn to meditate?”  (yes)  “Do you have any experience with meditation?”  (no)   “Are you Buddhist?”  (no)   “Can you sit cross legged on the floor for ninety minutes?  (no)  At least he me some basic instructions on how to meditate, and a book to read on the subject.

I went to the meditation center, which is located near Moulemein, Myanmar, with my friend Htun Thein, with whom I had known in Thailand ten years before while I was working for MSF (Doctors Without Borders).  We had often talked about going to the meditation center, and now he was eager to take me.

The day at the meditation center began at 3:30 AM with the pounding of a wooden drum.  At 4:00AM the first of five ninety minute meditation sessions began.  I was allowed to sit in a chair, but outside the main meditation hall so that my head was not higher than the heads of the monks who sat on the floor inside.

We ate breakfast at 5:45 AM and had lunch at 10:00 AM. We were not allowed to eat any food after 12:00PM.   For each meal I walked through the long food line after the monks were served, holding my tray with a large metal bowl that looked like a dog food bowl.  The food was bland but okay and there was plenty of it. Breakfast was noodles and vegetables, lunch was rice and vegetables, plus fresh fruit.  Hot sweet coffee was served with both meals.  We ate sitting on the floor of the covered walkway leading to the meditation hall.  After eating we washed our bowls and returned them.

I found the meditation difficult to say the least. The first and last sessions were in the dark.  During the evening session mosquitoes buzzed around my head. The first rule at the meditation center was that you are not allowed to kill any form of life, including mosquitoes. The monks sat under mosquito nets but I did not have one;  my repellent kept them from biting me, but not from buzzing me. 

The first time I tried to meditate the time seemed to go on and on, never ending.  I kept telling myself that soon the gong would ring and I could stop, but it never did.  When Htun Thein finally told me to stop meditating I discovered that I had been at it for almost three hours, and that there was no gong to mark the end of each session.  Htun Thein is a very good meditator, very self disciplined.

My bed was a wooden platform covered by a thin mat. I did have a mosquito net which helped with the insects but prevented any breeze from reaching me. I slept poorly and in the morning I found that the bedbugs in my blanket had feasted on me, leaving 15 bright red extremely itchy spots on my body. If I could have found a bed bug I certainly would have broken the first cardinal rule. You may wonder why I needed a blanket. Well it actually did get chilly around 2 AM.

People at the meditation center were very friendly and supportive. They seemed genuinely glad to have me there even though I felt like a fish out of water.  Would I go there again? Well probably not, but I'm very glad I went this time, if nothing else it makes for great journal fodder. And I am  seriously hoping that I can learn to meditate, to control my untamed mind.

A Street in Yangon

Yangon windows

Happy Thanksgiving!

I just returned from a month in Thailand and Myanmar and will soon start to post again.  But for today, let's all give thanks for all that we have and have received.

Southwest Trip

After a month in the Southwest I am back home in Seattle, unpacking, washing clothes, opening my mail, deleting emails, and most importantly, preparing for my next trip.

I flew to Albuquerque on September 20th, picked up a rental car, and drove to Gallup to stay with my friend Terry Sloan overnight, then I drove to Shiprock to start a two week stint.  It’s always good to go there, both to work and to see friends.  The work’s not hard - I don’t take call - and I (almost) always find it enjoyable.  And there’s lots to do - half price hamburgers at Three Rivers Brewery on Monday nights, cookouts on Ten Mile Mesa on Wednesday nights (although we did get rained out), dinners with friends.  Over the weekend between my two weeks working I drove to our cabin in Chama for a quick visit.  It was great there - peaceful, quiet, beautiful.

After my work was done I drove to Gallup again to visit friends (the Iralus,  Milan and Paula, Ed Hui,) then I went back to Shiprock and met Nonnie, Colin, and Oran there, and after eating dinner with the Mohs family we crashed in the apartment overnight.   The next morning we drove to our cabin in Chama.  The solar electric and water collection systems were working fine, and in the evening we had the luxury of reading by an electric light plus the light from candles and an oil lamp that my grandparents used.  Oran seemed to love the cabin life, as did Ono, the three legged dog.  Did I mention that she came with Colin, Oran, and Nonnie in the car?  A real road trip for all of them, camping out in Yellowstone, The Grand Tetons, and several other campgrounds on the 1,400 mile trip from Seattle to Shiprock.

Next Nonnie and I drove to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and Colin and Oran, after picking up Sarah and dropping Ono off in Albuquerque, drove to the park and met us in the lodge.  We spent three days and nights there and had a wonderful time.  My favorite evening was eating pizza and drinking red wine on the veranda overlooking the canyon.

After the drive back to Gallup we ate dinner at Jerry’s and stayed with Ed, then we went to Albuquerque and stayed at the uptown Marriott, just a couple of blocks from where we used to live.  We had breakfast with Bruce and Isabelle and dinner with Dave and Eve at the home of their friends Erica and John.  The next morning Colin picked us up and we drove back to Seattle, stopping in motels in Provo and Baker City along the way.  The last morning we had breakfast at one of my all time favorite cafes, the Inland Cafe in Baker City, and then we were home for dinner.

My next trip?  I leave for Bangkok, Yangon, and Mandalay next Thursday.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love,” says the ninety year old narrator about his love for a thirteen year old virgin whore.  She is the first true love of his life, and he likes her best when she is asleep.  Perhaps because when she is asleep he can make her whatever he wants her to be, but when she is awake she is what she is: poor, illiterate, immature. 

A common themes in the authors writing is the power of love to make old men young.  And the power of unrequited love to make men bitter.  “Age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel.”  At ninety the narrator gladly exchanges wisdom for emotion, and starts writing his weekly column in the style of love letters to the girl.

I suppose all men want to live forever, and falling in love at ninety proves you are still alive.  To love is to live.  What do ninety year old men want more of in their lives?  "More love," wrote one ninety year old author.

It's a great book - Highly recommended.

Somewhere in the Washington Cascades

My Tooth

For the past ten days I have thought almost exclusively about my tooth.  First there was pain, diffuse pain involving the entire right side of my face whenever I drank hot coffee.  I went to my dentist and was referred to an endodontist, who couldn’t find any pathology on the first visit, but on my second visit, when I could finally localize the pain, he said the culpable tooth was cracked, and that after I spent $3,000 on a root canal and a crown it might only last a year.  The option was to have the tooth extracted.  I chose extraction.

Yesterday a very nice oral surgeon pulled my tooth, with a lot of cracking and crunching sounds.  Today I am writing this with an ice pack on my jaw, a pain in my head, and a funny metallic taste in my mouth.

This problem has given me some time to read.  I finished Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, a nonfiction account of the lives of people living in a Mumbai slum near the airport, behind the huge billboards advertising tile floors that are beautiful forever.  It is an excellent book, very well written, but I liked A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry even better.  The latter book is a novel, and the author creates his characters as he wants them to be, unrestrained by the truth.

In the 1980s I subscribed to a book series from Time-Life books, works that were, in the editors opinion, important and under-appreciated.  Some of them I read, some have sat on my bookshelf for 30+ years.  Now I am reading one of them, Mister Johnson, by Joyce Cary, the story of a Nigerian rogue in a British colony.  Having spent a year in Nigeria in 1977-1978, I can identify with so much of what is going on in the story - the parallel but separate lives of the whites and the locals, the entirely different interpretations of the same event by different characters.

Nonnie and I went to a play the other night, Waiting for Godot.  It was an excellent presentation in an intimate theater - we were in the fourth row center - but the play itself was disappointing, boring.  We have a tickets to four more plays, all by Shakespeare, which should be better.

Blanche

Blanche Crook

My father married Blanche in 1977; my own mother had died shortly after Nonnie and I were married in 1976.  Blanche was my ‘wicked’ stepmother and grandmother to our children. My father died in 1990, and for the next 24 years she continued to be close part of our family.

Blanche died last Monday at the age of 93. She was a wonderful woman, kind and loving, with nothing bad to say about anyone - the exact opposite of  the’ wicked’ stepmother stereotype.  She showed us how to grow old gracefully, how to maintain interest in the outside world, in other people. Although she had many health problems she did not complain, she asked about other people and their their well-being, their dreams and goals.

Over the years Blanche took many wonderful trips with us. Several times she and my father came to visit us in Aruba, and after he died she joined us on a trip to Hong Kong.  Colin and Derek were so excited, waiting for her in the arrival hall of the old Hong Kong Airport.

She had a wonderful smile, and seemed genuinely glad to see people. She was a real people person. The day before she died she was asking us to make sure that her lunch dates were all canceled. But she was old and frail and she told me she was ready to die. When her time came she simply closed her eyes and rested.  I sat with her all day in her hospital room, and at the end of the day I held her hand as she took her last breath.   Her absence creates a huge hole in our lives now.  We miss her terribly.

Derek's Birthday

Derek would have been 36 years old today.  But he died exactly two years and one day ago.  Even now writing these words is so incredibly painful, pain that has changed from unfocused shock to the ice crystal clarity of knowing that he is gone forever.  

I miss him so much.

My Struggle, Book 2

I finished reading Book 2 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard - book 2 of 6 - and I have to say that I enjoyed it, but I didn’t adore it.

Late in the book the author says:

"The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred value, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet."

“That were not about anything,” to me that sums of much of his writing.

Elsewhere he writes:

"Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life."

I’m not sure about his facts, but even if indifference is one of the seven deadly sins (sloth?), I think that meanness (wrath) - the opposite of kindness - is worse.  Mean people suck.

And while discussing friends and family he writes:

"… we were trapped in each other as in ourselves, we couldn’t escape, it was impossible to free yourself, you had the life you had."

Exactly, we can’t escape and most of us don’t want to.  But Karl Ove’s struggle is the struggle between the individual creative life and the family life.  On one hand he desperately wants time and space of his own so that he can write, on the other hand he is desperately in love with his wife and children, and wants to be part of their lives.  James Joyce wrote of the same struggle in the previous century, and did it with fewer words.

I hope this book is not, as the quote from a reviewer says, “the literary event of the century,” I hope there are better books to come.  But I will reserve final judgement until I have read all 6 volumes, if I ever do.

Somewhere in Montana

The long way home

Last Sunday Nonna and I left Gallup and headed north, spending the first night of our trip in Ogden Utah at a Best Western motel, complete with a hot shower, clean bed, and a TV with 50 channels but nothing on. The next morning we got up, ate some breakfast, and started driving north following our usual path to Oregon and Washington until we came to fork in the road and this time we turned right, up into Idaho and Montana. We drove along Highway 93 in Montana through the Bitterroot Valley, which is much drier and more baren than I expected, but still beautiful. We saw bighorn sheep drinking from the river, and lots of beautiful fishing spots.  After eating dinner at a brew pub we stopped at our first campsite, named Indian Trees, where we slept in our tent. The ground seemed harder than I remembered but otherwise we did fine, and in the morning we had hot coffee and doughnuts, then we drove off in search of a good breakfast.

We stopped in a nondescript place in Darby Montana called the Montana Café, where we were served by a somewhat reserved young man. The room was plain, nondescript, with  formica tables and straight chairs. But when my breakfast came it was one of the best I've had for years. It was a simple breakfast - bacon and eggs, hash browns and whole wheat toast. Everything was fresh, cooked to perfection, and it tasted great, the perfect breakfast. The coffee was somewhat weak but it only cost fifty cents, so I didn't complain.

We then continued to drive north, up to Missoula Montana, which is said to be beautiful, but we couldn't see very much because of all the smoke from the fires in Eastern Washington. We drove north out of Missoula still on Highway 93 through Polson and Lakeside, which is alongside Flathead Lake, then we continued on up to Kalispell, where we ate dinner, and then drove west through some beautiful mountains. When we reached Highway 56 we turned south and drove until we came to a campground named Bad Medicine, which is located on the edge of a large lake.  It was a very pleasant place to stay.   In the morning we got up and again had instant coffee and donuts.

After we packed up we drove west on Highway 200, and stopped at the Clark Fork Idaho where we found an excellent small café which served a delicious breakfast. I really like these independent cafés run by local people.  We then drove west to Washington where we got onto Highway 20 which we followed all the way across northern Washington.  We planned to eat dinner in Twsip but when we got there we were told that the power was out in the whole town, so we bought some bread, salami, cheese, wine, and chocolate and drove to Early Winter campground where we had a cold dinner and then climbed into our tent.

The next morning we drove on to the North Cascades national Park which had some of the most spectacular scenery of the trip, especially the area around Washington Pass. It was noon before we found a place where we could eat, and they stop serving breakfast at 11, so we had a nice hot lunch.  Before lunch we stopped at the National Park Visitor Center, which was great, as were some campgrounds we checked out.  We will surely be returning to spend more time in the park, remembering that highway 20 is closed in the winter

After lunch we drove home, only 2 1/2 hours.  We returned home tired, dirty, and happy to be home.  A hot shower was a needed luxury and my bed never felt so soft. Overall was a great trip and I can't wait to do it again.

Washington Pass, WA

A Road in Eastern Washington

Old schoolhouse, Eastern Washington

South America 1975

In the basement, in a big box at the bottom of a pile of big boxes, I found several reels of slides, pre-digital dinosaurs from my past.  Best of all were 2 reels of pictures taken on a trip to South America that Nonna and I made in the winter of 1975 - the winter in Oregon that is.  We were so young, so naive, so happy. 

One of my favorite pictures shows Nonnie in our hotel room in Rio.  The room is classical 70’s modern, the view out the window is stunning, and she looks great.  The picture fills me with a sense of happiness and optimism; I felt that anything was possible, that my whole life was just beginning, that it was going to be a great life, an interesting and exciting life.  In twelve hours I had gone from the snow of Oregon to the sun of Brazil, and I had done it with the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, although I may have been a little slow to realize it. 

Another picture shows Nonnie at the top of Sugar Loaf mountain overlooking the beach in Rio.  She is looking directly at the camera, that is at me, and I remember thinking how lucky I was at that moment.

The next stop was Iguacu Falls, which was a tropical paradise, full of incredible water falls, rivers, jungle, and parrots.  We took a little rowboat out to the edge of the falls, on one side of the tiny dock the water was still while on the other side it plunged over a waterfall, a hundred feet down.  The guy rowing obviously knew which side to take.

Then came Buenos Aires, a huge city where we stayed in a hotel with armed security officers outside our hotel room door, where the peso was devalued by 50% overnight, ruining the dreams of many of the locals.  We ate huge steaks and watched an outdoor play.

Then we flew to Lima, and ate one of the best meals of my life, in a neighborhood restaurant suggested in a tour book.  We didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English, and there weren’t any other tourists there, but we managed to get the biggest, and best, shrimp stuffed avocado ever, plus lots of ceviche, and grilled fish, and a wonderful bottle of wine.  A memorable feast.

After Lima we went to Cuzco, and Machu Picchu, where we climbed a local hill to get a stunning view of the ruins below.  One picture shows Nonnie climbing up some almost vertical stairs and the next shows us at the top - at the top of the mountain, at the top of our lives.

There is a sense of exhilaration in these pictures that I had forgotten,  a feeling of hopefulness, a sense that we could see forever, and do whatever we wanted with our lives.  Of course we had to return to our real lives in Portland, but the feelings were too strong to forget.

 

Above Machu Picchu

Rio de Janeiro, 1975

My Struggle

The critics love it; “Perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our time,” but after reading Book 1 (of 6) of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard I have to admit that I am not quite that enthused; I liked it; I didn’t love it.  And if it is the book of this century, then it joins Ulysses, the book of the last century,  as one of those books that only the critics and intellectuals love.  How many common people have read Joyce’s masterpiece, and how many understood it, let alone enjoyed it?

Still, there are parts of Book 1 that are brilliant, moments when the reader is in the mind of the writer, sharing all his thoughts, a kind of intellectual intimacy that is both uncomfortable and exhilarating. The book is described as an autobiographical novel, implying that it is fictional, but what is most likable in this book is its brutal honesty.  Now I’m about to start Book Two:  A Man in Love.  I’ll keep you posted.

I just finished reading The Age of Iron by JM Coetzee, an earlier work by one of my favorite authors.  It describes the last days of a woman in South Africa dying of cancer in the time of the last days of the white government, its doctrine of apartheid itself a type of cancer of the people of that country.  It is a forceful angry insightful book, as staggering as it is depressing.

The Fifth Year

Four years ago I - we - started our five year plan, to live our lives as if we had only five years left  to live, as if every day was precious.  We started with a train trip from New Mexico to Oregon to New York, then a trans-Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, then a rental car trip from Southampton to Crail, where we lived for a year in a three  hundred year old house on the harbor.

Crail was great, the perfect little seaside village, and from there we explored the rest of Scotland and parts of England, and when we weren’t traveling we were reading, writing, hiking, and taking classes online and in St Andrews, classes in writing, film, and history.

But, as they say, life happens.  Nonnie’s dad was hospitalized repeatedly in Oklahoma.  Colin and Sarah had a son, Oran.  So, instead of moving to Hong Kong as we had planned, we moved back to Albuquerque, and helped move Nonnie’s dad to San Antonio.  We spent lots of time with our new grandson and his parents, and with our other son Derek, including many memorable days and nights in our cabin in the hills south of Chama.  Then Derek died, and our world dimmed, and so much hope and love and joy was lost.

A year ago Colin, Sarah, and Oran moved to Seattle to start new jobs, and a new life.
We followed, and now we live in a rental house in the University District and Colin and Sarah are buying a house in north Seattle, a 3 bedroom mid-century modern home with a large fenced back yard.

The fifth and final year of our five year plan is beginning and there is no chance at this time of us moving to Hong Kong as we once planned, and life suddenly seems so finite, so limited, as if every day is valuable, and I feel bad when I waste days, as I often do.

My Parkinson’s Disease is there, like a dark shadow, stalking me, taunting me, frightening me.  But fear motivates, and when we are afraid we are alive.  Life to me seems ephemeral, un-solid, unpredictable, uncaring, unkind.

The question I struggle with everyday is simple, “what next”, but the answer is anything but simple, in fact it is frustrating in its complexity and terrifying in its importance.  

Kindness matters.  But what is a kind life, how can I be kind, can I plan kindness, can I change my character at my age?

In the coming years compromise will have to do, compromise in the sense that no one can live a perfect life, no one can be in multiple places at the same time.  I can’t be with the family I love in Seattle while I am hiking in the highlands of Scotland, or riding the Star ferry in Hong Kong.  Likewise I can’t visit my stepmother and my aunt in Oregon, both in their nineties, while I am working in New Mexico or visiting our projects in Thailand.  It’s impossible.

Maybe my life is now like an extensive menu in a Chinese restaurant, with week long choices, and I need only to plan and choose, arranging the weeks in a pleasing order.  I want my next year to be interesting and also helpful to others well as to myself.  I want to be kind.

Last night I read this quote in a book by JM Coetzee:  “…like sitting in front of a clock all day, killing the seconds as they emerged, counting one’s life away.”

That I want to avoid at all costs.

So let the fifth year begin!

White House Ruins #1

Whiite House Ruins #2

El Morro pool

Visitors

Last night old friends came for dinner.  I met them 20 years ago when I was working for the Peace Corps in Almaty, Kazakhstan.  She was a young Russian doctor who came to interview for a job with the Peace Corps medical office.  I chose her and we became colleagues and friends.  They bought my apartment and rented it back to the Peace Corps, and became our landlords.  Later she came to the US to study for her US medical license, and her husband and two children came with her.  And now 20 years later we all sat down for dinner in a different place, in a different time.  It was so great to see them.  Their son has just started a new job with Amazon here in town, so I hope I will see more of them.

Last week Nonnie's three nieces came to visit. They stayed a few days and then drove to Port Angeles. When they came back Nonnie’s sister flew into town with her two grandchildren, so then we had six people staying with us. It was fun but rather crowded and hectic. Over the years I haven't seen too much of Nonnie’s family, so it's nice to have them come visit us.  Sarah, Colin, and Oran came for dinner; it was great to have the whole family together.  Oran had a good time with his new cousins.

In the meantime we were still dealing with finding a new house for Colin and Sarah.  It turns out the house we found needs a new roof, so we're negotiating over that.  Buying a house is such a hassle.

Enroute to Orcas Island

Fishing and Baseball

Last weekend Colin and I went fishing near Mt Rainier National Park.  We fished just outside the park in a beautiful stream. It was the first time I had been to Mt Rainier in 50 years, but there were so many clouds I never did see the mountain. We drove three hours, fished for one hour, and caught nothing, so we went to a bar and had a beer and a sandwich.  The bar looked like a set from a David Lynch movie - Twin Peaks revisited.  After the beer we felt better and found another stream to fish in.  Each of us got one  trout, which we released, but at least we didn't get skunked.  All in all it was a great trip and I really enjoyed myself.

Sunday was Father's Day and Colin got tickets to the Mariners baseball game for us.  It was a cloudy showery day and the roof was closed, but we had a great time.  Safeco Field is wonderful, and the crowd was is in a good mood.  Everybody was eating hot dogs and garlic fries, drinking beer and Coke, and enjoying their afternoon.  The Mariners beat the Texas Rangers which added greatly to our experience.  After the game we wandered over to an alehouse and had a beer while we waited for our wives to come pick us up.  Then we went back to Colin's house and had a barbecue.  All in all it was a good Father's Day.

House hunting

We are once again in the process of looking for a house to buy. This time, however, the house is for our son and daughter-in-law and grandson to live in. We’ve already gone through the tedious process of applying for a mortgage with a local bank. In prior years all they wanted to know was your heart rate and body temperature, but now they want to know every detail about your financial life.

Houses in Seattle are very expensive. A relatively nice house costs half a million. The closer you get to downtown the higher the cost goes. So we are  looking further and further to the north of Seattle. Many buyers here are offering all-cash -  they don't even need a mortgage. That's hard to to compete against. The average house seems to sell in a few days. All in all it's a rather unpleasant experience, at least for me, and Nonna is doing all the work.

Some old friends are coming to visit. Next week our friends from Kazakhstan are coming to help their son move to Seattle. I remember him as a little boy in Almaty.  Now he is grown up and is starting a job at Amazon. It will be great to see them again. It's been twenty years since we lived in Almaty, twenty years since all those wonderful dinners at their house.

Resolutions revisited

Now seems like a good time to go back and revisit my New Year's resolutions, to see how I am doing. I did visit two old friend whom I had not seen from more than one year. I have completed both the speech and physical therapy programs. I'm trying to eat more chocolate and drink more wine. But I have utterly failed to write in my blog once a week. But all starts anew from today.

In April I spent three weeks working at Shiprock IHS Hospital. On the weekends I visited friends in Gallup, went to our cabin in Chama, and stayed with friends in Pagosa. I had a great time and after that trip I missed the Southwest more than ever.

Recently I read three good books; Americanah by Chimamanda Adiche, Tenth of December by George Saunders, and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It's been a long time since I read so much great writing in such a short time.

I've gone camping. Colin and I went to Grand Coulee for an overnight trip with Oran and his dog, Ono. We had our hands full, and I can't say it was a relaxing trip. However the scenery was beautiful, much like the Southwest, quite different from Western Washington.

We have been busy looking for a new house for Colin and Sarah. They will have to move out of their house in Discovery Park, since those houses have been sold to a developer who is kicking all of the tenants out. Too bad, as it was very nice for them to live in the middle of the park; too good to be true or to last. Houses in Seattle are expensive, and many people are buying with cash. I don't know where they get that much cash but they have it.  I guess they work for Microsoft.

It is been more than one year now since he moved into our house. It seems the times gone by so quickly. We will stay here another year and probably longer after that. The house is nice and the location is excellent. The owner is putting on a new roof this summer, and is replacing the furnace. That should help us through the next winter.

We have made several short ships to Oregon.  The last one was on Memorial Day weekend. The traffic was horrible, so the trip was less enjoyable and it should have been. Still, I always enjoy visiting my family and friends.  We did put flowers on the graves of our family members on Saturday, starting with Derek’s.  That was painful

Yesterday I spoke on Skype with Dhondhup, a Tibetan doctor whom I worked with at the Delek hospital in Dharamsalah, India.  He is now working in southern India in a large Tibetan resettlement area. He is the only doctor at his hospital and invited me to come and help him for a while. It is very tempting; the hospital looks modern; I’m sure the people are nice, and it would be a meaningful experience. Maybe sometime – I hope so.

The editor of the  ACP Internist called and interviewed me for her magazine. She sent me a draft of her article which seen well-written. I sent her some pictures but she said they probably can't use them because I don't have a release from the people in the pictures. It's nice to be recognized, and I'm looking forward to seeing the article. Maybe it will create more support for TBBHI.  I don't feel that I'm very good at beating our donation drum

Well it's getting late, and if I'm going to drink more wine I had better get started.

Opening August 9th

Northern Cascades, WA

Lake 22, an hour northeast of Seattle

Oran's Third Birthday

Purple Hibiscus

In 1977 I spent a year working in rural Nigeria with the Tiv people, so reading Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie brought back many memories. While living in Nigeria I found one of the best, and only, ways to understand the local people was to read books by local authors. One of my favorites, and certainly the best known, was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Both books describe the Igbo people and the effect of colonization and modernization on their culture. The opening sentence of Purple Hibiscus reflects the influence  of the earlier book: "Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion..."

Purple Hibiscus is the coming-of-age story of a 15-year-old Igbo girl, Kambili, set in southern Nigeria. The story is good and the writing itself is even better. The descriptions of the land, the people, and their customs are wonderful.  Kambili describes, and I remember, the taste of fufu - pounded yam  - dipped in thick tasty soup, the inconvenience of gasoline shortages, the feel of  sand everywhere when the  harmattan blows, the scary feeling of dealing with an illegitimate military government, and the custom of dashing - bribing or giving a gift - to everyone from the police to a neighbor.

If you want to peek into another culture, to try to understand a little what it means to be an African, I strongly recommend this book. The author has a new book out now, Americanah, so she's getting a lot of attention. Purple Hibiscus, her first book, seemed to improve with each chapter, the writing getting stronger and stronger.  If this pattern holds her newest book should be great.

Xmas lights at the zoo

Notre Dame Cathedral - Strasbourg

A small church in Bavaria

Strasbourg

Susi and I left Stuttgart in her car around 6 PM and drove to Strasbourg on the autobahn, where Eva met us at our hotel.   Strasbourg is a beautiful old city in the Alsace region of France.  From our hotel we could walk to the Notre Dame Cathedral along narrow streets lined with cafés, bars, and shops selling various meats, cheeses, chocolates, breads, and other wonderful items.

Eva and Susi are the daughters of Martin and Ursula,  who I have known for over 40 years, since we met in Johnstown Pennsylvania as medical students so many years ago. This time Martin and Ursula watched the grand kids while we had our trip.  After checking into the Hotel Gutenberg, we went out for dinner to the Café Klu, where I had a knuckle of ham braised in Pinot Noir sauce and roasted potatoes, along with an excellent Riesling wine. The dinner was delicious and the café was very atmospheric. After dinner we went looking for a bar, which was not hard to find. First we had a beer in a very crowded neighborhood bar and then went looking for another bar. The second bar had a bicycle theme, and I had one of the worst beers of my life there - just unbelievable. It tasted as if someone had poured sugar or sweetened syrup into the beer. Eva's beer tasted the same. We drank part of our beer and  left, looking for a different bar in order to get something good on our palate again. We found one, where we had a good German beer, but by then it was 2 AM and the bars were closing, so we had to go back to our hotel to sleep.

In the morning we went out looking for breakfast.  We had coffee and croissants at the first place we stopped at and then went to another coffee shop, where we had coffee and wonderful assorted pastries. After that we walked for a while and visited a museum dedicated to the works of Tomi Ungerer.. He was a cartoonists and artist who wrote children's books and also made cartoons and covers for the New Yorker magazine. It was an interesting museum.

Next came lunch. We went to the Brasserie Rissi, which offered a special two course lunch. I had  foie gras for my starter and steak tartare for my main dish. The steak was a bit underdone but otherwise the meal was superb.  After lunch we went shopping for sausages, cheeses, and chocolates, and then Eva drove me back to Stuttgart and Susi drove to her home in Nuremberg.

It was a great trip, one of my very best.

View from Hohenpeissenberg

Business Class

The business class lounge is a bright well lit room with wood floors, louvered ceiling, recessed lights, big windows, leather lounge chairs, high counters with stools, free coffee, beer, food, snacks - and people from all over the globe speaking a variety of languages - all sitting together in the Frankfurt Lufthansa lounge. Beer for breakfast?

Flight 491, nonstop from Seattle to Frankfurt.  My console seat changes to a lounge chair or a flat bed.  I sleep, wake up, push the massage button, go back to sleep.  The stewardess brought champagne before takeoff and a choice of wines after takeoff, and again with dinner.  I chose an excellent Riesling served from the bottle into a real glass.  For dinner I had a shrimp cocktail, cod with noodles, and a cheese plate for dessert, all served on real plates and silverware, on a white tablecloth.

After dinner I started a new book;  My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.  The writing is great -  dense, heavy - a three month book. 

Birds

Football

Usually I’m not much of a football fan, but last Sunday I spent the day at my son Colin’s house watching TV.   First we watched Denver play, and beat, New England.  It was a rather dull game in spite of all the hype, since the outcome was never really in doubt.

All afternoon I grazed on junk food - chips, guacamole, queso, hot wings, chili poppers, brownies, beer - it was great, delicious, the best part of the day, almost.

Then we watched Seattle play San Francisco for the National Conference championship.  Seattle didn’t play that well in the first half and I feared we might lose.  Almost everyone in Seattle seems to be a Seahawk fan, and if they lost I was afraid that everyone would be in a bad mood for weeks.  In the second half Seattle finally scored some points and took the lead, but the outcome was still in doubt up until the last twenty seconds of the game.  The more exciting the game got the more stress I felt; the more stress I felt the more hot wings and chili poppers I ate.  I wolfed down a ton of them.

It was a very enjoyable day, although probably not a healthy one.  My belly ached all night.

Change of plans

Nonna and I worried a lot about the unrest in Bangkok and the threats to shut down the city, and at the same time Sarah is starting a new job here in Seattle and needs help watching Oran,  so in the end we decided to postpone our trip to Thailand until later in the year.

That left me with the fortuitous combination of four weeks with nothing planned and a lot of frequent flyer miles in my United account. After a few emails and inquiries online, I decided to fly to Germany for two weeks.  I will leave January 27 and spend my mini vacation visiting old friends, ones that I haven't seen for years. That will take care of New Year's resolution number five.

Now I have to start doing some planning to get ready for my trip. I can't take the same clothes to Germany as I was going to take to Thailand. But a large part of the fun of traveling is the preparation, so I'd better get busy getting prepared.

Some resolutions for 2014

Enjoy life more
drink more wine
eat more chocolate
visit at least one new country
visit at least one old friend whom I haven’t seen for more than a year
complete both speech therapy and physical therapy programs
write in this blog once a week, every week
read a book every 2 weeks
write another draft of my Greenland memoir
get my financial affairs in order
have a photography show of my Bhutan pictures

2013 - A Summary

If 2012 brought death and sorrow to my life then 2013 brought disease and frustration.  I first noticed a slight tremor in my right hand when Derek was in the hospital, but I wrote it off to stress.  Over the next year it slowly got worse, and I noticed that my handwriting, which was never good, was deteriorating.  Buttoning my shirt got more difficult, as did eating with chopsticks.  I knew what it was but I denied it, until I finally went to see a neurologist who confirmed my fears and diagnosed Parkinson Disease.

So now my problem has a name and a face, a treatment and a prognosis.  I will get worse, but how fast I will fail is unknown.  Now really is the beginning of the end of my life; tomorrow really is the first day of the rest of my life. 

Maybe I should feel sadness and depression, but instead I feel anger and frustration; I simply don’t have time for this.  I am a doctor - I am not a patient.  Except, of course, that I am a patient with a primary doctor, a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders, a physical therapist, a speech therapist, and probably most importantly a clinical psychologist.  I’m not even taking medication - yet.  But soon I will need to start, and once I start I can never stop.

When I sat down to write I intended to reflect on what I did in 2013, so I’ll move on to that.  I went to Hong Kong, Thailand, and Bhutan.  We moved from Albuquerque to Seattle, and I worked several separate times in Shiprock NM.  We took short trips to Pacific Beach WA, Port Angeles WA, and Vancouver BC. I went to my 50th high school reunion.  We made several trips to Oregon to visit family and friends.  We bought a new car.  And we babysat our grandson Oran, who is the candle flame in our darkness.  Nothing heals better than a child's laughter.