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.