Winding, Crooked Trails

Been a long time, yeah? Going on eighteen years since I started WCT. I have it tatooed on my right inner arm. I occasionally think of posting again. I notice from stat counter that I still get the rare visitor from time to time. If you sometimes show up here drop me a comment and let me know. Who knows, I may write again.

On Reading

I read, have read, and will read the rest of my cognitive life.  I can not fathom not being able to read.  I am not "formally" educated.  I did not care for and did not fare well at traditional schooling, however I do consider myself a very well educated individual.  That education, along with a lifetime of observations and experiences, constitutes my education level.  Not a rationalization, not an excuse, just a fact.  I do wish I had a sheepskin or two framed on my wall.  Shame on me for opportunities wasted.  But I read, therefore, to a great degree, I am who I am.

Two things in the news this week have me thinking about reading in general and my reading in particular.

One, there are disconcerting reports around the financial viability of Barnes & Noble.  Sales for the last quarter are down double digits and the company plans on closing up to fifteen stores a year in the future. Particularly troubling considering the recent bankruptcy and closure of the Borders enterprise.  I believe B&N to be the last standing national chain bookstore.  On a personal level, because I spend over half my time in various cities traveling for business, B&N has become a home away from home for me.  I don't go to bars, rarely to movies, and other than a park or my hotel room I can usually be found sitting in an overstuffed chair with a book or browsing the aisles at the local Barnes & Noble.  I can get a coffee or an iced tea and I can peruse books on any number of topics, books I may or may not choose to ultimately purchase.  I have researched my travels, read new authors to determine if I want them on my list of must reads, and in general productively and enjoyably passed hours and hours of time that would otherwise be spent not doing much of anything.  Except maybe reading in my hotel room.

Recently while visiting my father he asked my how many books I thought I had read in my lifetime.  While I do not know the anser to that question with any degree of certainty it got me to doing some calculations.  I know I started reading regularly and frequently before I was ten when my parents would take us religiously to the public library year round and there were also books available in the school libraries.  Six to seven books a month doesn't seem out of the question on average so over a half a century plus, that would be something around four thousand.  That seems light, I don't know.  I would say it's more than that.

But that's just books.  There are newspapers, magazines, and of couse for the past dozen years or so the internet.  Ah yes, the internet.  I could not begin to calculate how many articles, news stories, etc. I have read on the internet.  As a matter of fact technology has reshaped just how I read.  E-books; I've read and still have on my devices many and still download a couple a month.  And then there are audiobooks.  I very much enjoy audiobooks.  That are wonderful for travel.  On nearly all of my dozens and dozens of trips to and from Canada I've listened to audiobooks.  I have my favorite narrators and fortunately they read some of my favorite authors.  I've taken over five hundred flights in the past four years and during the majority of that time I'm either reading the written word or listening to the spoken.  Sometimes it's nice to lay my head back with a pair of noise cancelling headphones and rest the eyes and listen.  At my age my eyes tire quicker than my ears.  And they are free at the library.  I download them to my computer and then to my phone or ipad.

And then there is work.  Forty years of charts and graphs and blueprints and emails and business letters, purchase orders, technical data, on and on.

My wife reads (I think even more than I do), my children read, my mother and her father read.  I was read to and read to my children.  I think that is the beginning for a reader, being read to when young.

So where will people go to buy books if Barnes & Noble closes?  There are independent bookstores but they are far and few between and do we really want to have our choices reduced to the commercial pap we see at every airport newstand and drugstore?  Walmart?  The same ten authors who churn out the same template over and over.  I swear James Patterson must write one a week.

My tastes have matured over the years.  I don't waste my time on some of the tripe I read in my younger days.  I'm much more selective.  I want the well turned phrase, thinking man's words, provocative and lyrical.  A well plotted story at least, something that takes me down a path I want to go.  I love when a sentence stops me in my tracks and makes me wish I had written it.

But I did say that there were two things that have me thinking about reading this week. The second was the death of Elmore Leonard, one of my all time favorite authors.  You may know the name, you may not.  You would recognize some of his books that have been turned into movies.  He was 87 and his passing makes me sad, selfishly knowing I will never read anything from him again (except for the rereading which I have already done and I'm sure will do some more of).  I've been reading him for around forty years.  It's like losing a friend.

I wanted to know some facts about illiteracy so I found the chart below.  It's mind boggling.  Try to imagine this many people who can't read street signs, menus, newspapers, their mail...

It must make an already sometimes overwhelming world all that much more foreign and confusing.  I can not begin to envision how different my life would have been and would be now without the comprehension and pure joy of the written word.

To those elementary school teachers during my early years, I've woefully underestimated you contribution to my life's productiviey, knowledge, and enjoyment.  Bless you for opening these magic doors.

 

Statistic Verification

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Literacy

Research Date: 4.28.2013

 

U.S. Illiteracy Statistics	Data
Percent of U.S. adults who can’t read	14 %
Number of U.S. adults who can’t read	32 Million
Percent of U.S. adults who read below a 5th grade level	21 %
Percent of prison inmates who can’t read	63 %
Percent of high school graduates who can’t read	19 %
Global Illiteracy
Number of people worldwide who can’t read	774 Million
Percent of the worlds illiterate who are female	66 %

More that one Life to Live

I certainly don't expect anyone to be interested in my life story but this just seems to be the place for my stream of consciousness.  As one ages there is a lot more thought given to "just how the hell did I get to where I am now?"  I've obviously reached that stage you've seen in your grandparents where they go "why I remember when..."

Do you think you live more than one life in a lifetime?  I do.  Because I have.  Right now I'm in Lifezone Five.  I don't mean those subtle transitions like chapters in a book.  I'm talking about like Part 2, or the next book in a trilogy (or whatever you call it when there are more than three).  I'm talking about strong lines of demarcation that you can look back on and say to yourself "wow, my life certainly changed on that day, or with that event...that was the end of that, or the beginning of a new era".  I believe there certainly can be significant occurances within a particular "life" that don't necessarily denote the beginning of a new one, like really important chapters, but that's all subjective and should be left to self determination.  After all it's your life and you can subtitle it as you see fit.  Or not.

For me, it's not that difficult to see where one leaves off and another begins due to the significant emotional events that have turned the pages in my life book.

Life One 

Pretty simple to identify the beginning here.  I was born.  

I see my initial Life as my childhood and growth into early adulthood.  My nuclear family life, my life as a dependent on my parents' tax returns.  Not that I didn't grow into a great deal of independence during this life but I was primarily under their roof, their rules, their thumbs.  

A Leave it to Beaver life (actually my brother was the Beav, I was Wally).  He was he one who constantly got the comment "he's gonna knock em dead when he grows up", I suppose it was assumed that I would more or less just ultimately make them miserable.  Seriously though, I was a true child of the post WW2 era of whitebread prosperity, a strong extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who spent holidays and weekends together, camping and eating and just enjoying the comforts that come with being so important to such a large group of people who loved you.  The security of being a part of a large cohesive unit of support and caring.  

What I had was so predictable and comforting that I did not have any idea of what we did not have.  We had just enough to make me think we had it all.  I do not recall any awareness that there were those who had significantly more, or less.  It was a homogenous time for me. My family, neighbors, and friends and acquanitances all had pretty much the same thing.  We all lived similar lives.  Our homes and families looked about the same, from my superficial view anyway.  We were all the same color.  Our parents were married and stayed that way.  I don't think I was aware of a "broken" family until I was in my early teens. We had one black family in the neighborhood, with one daughter with whom I went to school.  Nice folks, of course.  My parents didn't fight, we never went hungry, it was so very safe and secure.  

Friends and sports were everything for my brother and me.  I had a cousin a year older who was like another brother.  The suburbs were fresh and new, the fences at the baseball fields were bright and white, the grass cut.  We burned our trash, I had a clunky bike, the only bike I was to have.  It was for getting to a friend's house or the basketball court or baseball diamond.  I've never done a wheelie.  We didn't have elaborate birthday parties, I don't remember having birthday parties at all really.  A present from your parents, that was about it.  

We had a phone, with a party line.  If the other people on your party line were on the phone you heard them talking when you picked up the phone to use it.  You waited until they were done to use the phone. At one point we had our own ring so we could identify if the call was ours and not theirs.  We had dog, he lived outside with a dog house.  He lived his life on a long chain.  We'd bring him into the garage at night when it was cold.  His name was Lucky.  Maybe he thought he was.  My Mom said it because we were lucky to have him.

We went to Sears alot, I think because you could get a lot of things there.  But they didn't have clothes at that time and there was only one Sears in town.  No malls, no discount stores like Walmart.  No fast food. We rarely went to a restaurant until I was in my early teens, then it was a favorite Chinese place and a cafeteria we liked.  Extended family dinners were always pitch ins. My dad almost always worked a second job, he would paint houses that were just being built in our neighborhood and he worked at concession stands at sporting events and circuses and ice shows.  He would later become an executive at GM through hard work and achievement, not through any formal training or education.  I never gave it a second thought that my mother did not finish high school or that my father never went to college.  My Mom did not work outside the home until I was a teenager.  I never had a babysitter or stayed with anyone that wasn't a grandparent or an aunt and uncle.  When I was two my Dad was called back into the Navy and we moved to a small town near Jacksonville, Florida where there was a Naval base.  We were there for a year and a half or so.  Florida and the beach are my earliest memories.  That period was the beginning of dozens of drives I've made to and from Florida.    

Our games were simple, mostly sports related, games with boards or dice or cards.  We collected baseball cards, religiously. (I have my collection to this day and it was actually appraised during one of my divorces to be worth in excess of $10K).  TV was small and black and white, no color until I was 16 or so.  I had a car before we had a color TV.  There were three networks, one independent station that came in fuzzy. We went to the movies, the kids classics of course but my parents always took us to grown up movies as well.  We went to the drive in movies more often than not.  Took our own popcorn.  I don't remember my parents ever purchasing anything from the concession stand.  My brother and I were supposed to sleep in the backseat during the second movie.  I never did.  We saw a lot of Westerns.  

We got a hi-fi record player, in a cabinet that was like a furniture piece, when I was ten or so.  We mostly listened to my parents' music from a record club we joined.  We also had Elvis.  I had a transistor radio and listened to all the new stuff at night, I can still remember most of those songs.  I noticed girls and I liked them.  Our neighborhood had a surprising number of boys my age, not many girls at all.  But I always knew where they were.  We had moved to the burbs when I was eight, brand new 3 bedroom ranch, about 1000 square feet, one bath.  I think it cost my parents about $14,000.  Life was good.  I suppose I was aware that my parents had come from some very humble beginnings but we were moving on up and I never considered myself, or us, as being any more or less than anyone else.  It seemed like there were athletes and movie stars, people on TV...and then everybody else.  My parents kept the hardships and complications from us.  

It really was that simple, it really was.  

The big change came when people in my family started dying.

That was the beginning of Chapter Two of Life One.

Happy Wanderer

I've had a couple of jobs too good to be true but number one on the list was my 18 months in South Florida. I spent the entire time in a fifty room marina resort on the Intercoastal Waterway in a little fishing village called Port Salerno.  The sign at the village's entrance stated:

"A small drinking village with a large fishing problem".

 

I spent countless hours under those blue awnings drinking cocktails and eating delicacies from the sea, most of which had been swimming earlier that day, talking to the snowbirds down for the season from Jersey and Philly and New York.  Several had relocated permanently to the area either recently in retirement or in years past.  I liked hanging at one of the few places where I was a youngster.  I'm pretty good at inserting myself into conversations, made easy by the small square bar with my favorite bartenders serving up libations and adding to the comraderie.  The many thousands of dollars I spent at the establishment garnered me preferred status and my drink would be placed in front of me upon my settling onto my stool.

There was generally a sweet, salty seabreeze and always the seabird sounds and lapping water from passing fishing and pleasure boats.  I had the same room every week, second floor just over the pool with a view of the water and the marina.  The photo above was actually taken from my room's balcony, about 75 steps from the bar/restaurant.  An additional advantage being you can't really be charged with walking under the influence.  

They were sad when I left, not as sad as me of course, their sadness being a fifty thousand dollar plus customer leaving.  All expenses paid.  Like I said, too good to be true.  

Not many days go by that I don't think about that eighteen months.  It's not that I didn't apprecite it then, I did, I loved every minute.  I've always loved Florida, ever since my family started vacationing there around my 11th or 12th summer.  We drove of course, straight through most times to avoid cost on the way down and to maximize our time at the beach.  We went on the cheap.  I don't think I gave that much thought, they are some of my best memories.  You went to Florida in the summer, after the Little League baseball season was over, late July, early August.  It was over 90, temperature and humidity, hot, hot.  That was my Florida.  

In the many years since I've been to almost all parts of the state both for business and pleasure.  All told I've probably spent close to 3 years in Florida.  At least 20-25 vacations, 40-50 business trips, other than my idillyc 18 month stint mentioned above.  

Florida is a close second, to the mountains, desert canyons, and rivers of the West as my favorite, chosen place to be.  

I'd be happy ending up in either.

I think we all have places our hearts feel at home.  Locations that become spiritual centers.  I've for the most part lived in one place my entire life but with my frequent travels have pieces of myself spread across the continent.  Scattering my ashes around my sacred places will use up of all my frequent flyer miles.

Legalize em both!

It's no surprise that gay marriage and the legalization of Marijuana are coming together.  The bible says that if two men lay together, they should be stoned. 

Wel, yeah.

Remembering Ought Four

I didn't know how much my life would change later in the year back in the Spring of '04.  Or that I was soon to meet several of you, the yous that are still present and the yous that aren't.  There are only three or four of you in the present category and it doesn't surprise me who you are.

I was nearing the end of the "fifty first dates" segment of my life, satisfied that it was ending, not so much so with its results.  To this day I feel uncomfortable walking into a Starbucks.  So much coffee, so little sex.  So weird waiting for someone to walk in, the initial eye contact, both thinking are you the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with?  There were no hookups on Match.com, this was the serious stuff folks.  

Fifty no's.  Certainly not all of them mine.

Let's see, the boy was 15 and we were still constant companions.  He hadn't come into his own yet and I was just beginning to come into mine.  I was a late bloomer.

Just a little over three years from a divorce that left me with a car full of all my worldly possessions (not for the first time) but well on the road to financial recovery via the job that was too good to be true. 

May of that year was my last real solo trip West.  All over Utah and into the Colorado mountains for two weeks.  I was to go back to Utah and the Grand Canyon later that Fall with my daughters and Ex #1.

By the end of the year I was to move (as announced, pictorially, on WCT) into the home I still live in.  By the end of this year it will be the home in which I've lived the longest since my childhood.     

In the midst of all that, August 1, of perhaps the most significance (unknown at the time) was my initial blog post on Winding, Crooked, Trails.

Who knew?

That was nine years ago this summer.  Nine freaking years, kids.  I've certainly learned, and certainly some of you have as well, that life is often a series of random clicks.  The opposite of shoulda, woulda, coulda I guess you could say.

A couple of jobs later, a move to another country and back, three years plus of marriage, one heart attack and a blood transfusion later and here we are still a rockin' and a rollin'.

I guess I was old in the Spring of Ought Four, but if I admit that, what's that make me now?  

But that's just on the outside.  I saw a video the other day on YouTube.  Just do a search for "world's largest rope swing" or Corona Arch and take a look.  I'd link it but I'm too lazy (on the outside).  Anyway, I still feel (on the inside) the way those young'uns do in that video.  And that's they key isn't it?  Keepin' it real on the inside?  

Because a lot of some bad outside shit rains down sometimes, on everyone, some more than others. Sometimes more than other times.  Some of it you deserve and some you don't.  And with some luck and love there are people in your life that care, they really do.  In their certain amount of alloted caring time. But they got their own ins and outs to deal with, yeah?  And yes, sacrifice is a noble thing and many are better at it than others.  But essentially everyone has their own bad outside that they just got over or is looming on the horizon.  Being that's how life is and all.  

And so, in my advanced years, I think I've discovered that the eternal struggle, albeit a very difficult one, is to only let the outside get so far inside.  Keep that inside as stand alone as possible.  

Because if you don't, it seems rather simple to me, if you don't...

All the outside seeps in and there isn't room left for any inside.

And I don't think other people think much of those with no inside, or of themselves without one.

So maybe it's not all that simple to explain.  

But I do know that in the Spring of Ought Four, I was more outside than in.

And that Winding, Crooked, Trails and it's resultant relationships was a larger rather than smaller part of that personal growth.

 

 

 

 

 

Repost for Valentine's Day

Holding on - Letting go

He knew she had no idea it was Valentine’s Day, or Tuesday, or February, or Indiana.  Did she know it was winter?  He wondered what his words sounded like to her.  He was sure she understood his tone.  She would sigh, just sigh, tired sighs and would sometimes wail him to heartbreak in her sleep, a keening hurtful  piercing of his soul.  It was getting more and more difficult to sleep with her, calming her into a round softness that fit to him was all but impossible now.  Holding her was like putting your arms around a bag of sticks and she would recoil at his touch and startle into a wide eyed fear so he’d lay on his back and his eyes would stare at the shadows of the room where she once knew him like no one has since or will again.  When she knew his name and his favorite color and what he wanted for dinner and how to starch his shirts and brush her hair.  

It turned into a joke, his heart shaped box of candy hastily purchased on this day every year even when his other gifts became  shiny or silky and were planned with love and care.   Always the gaudy box, red with gold cursive and piping.  Always left about for two weeks after, always eaten, left about like she wanted the tree left up til after New Years and the flag out long after the fourth, never wanting to let go, her roses tended and pruned the night before the first frost, always savoring the last bloom.

The irony wasn’t lost on him, thank God it was on her, her life now having let go of everything it once was.  She was forgetting to breathe, had already forgotten how to eat, the chewing futile when you don’t know how to swallow.  It wasn’t just her last Valentine’s Day, it was her last month, he wanted one more spring for her but it wasn’t going to happen.  He was loving her to death lifting the heartshaped lid and like always picking one he knew she wouldn’t like and biting into it making the face that made her laugh, raspberry.  

Her eyes followed him, he popped the rest in his mouth, patted her hand, felt more than heard her sigh and picked up the phone to call the kids, telling them to come soon and then plan on coming back again soon after.

Her eyes moved to the box making him hope just maybe her life hadn’t outlived her love.

Detached attachments

I've always had an affinity for old things, enhanced of late as I've become one.  In my travels I search out the abandoned, homes, sheds and garages and barns, graveyards and headstones, old factories and mills and farms.  I like to see them and think about their history, all the things that happened there.  People who lived there, worked there, loved and died there.  I like old stuff.  I have old coins, books, all my old family photos from both sides.  I am my family's historian.  Much of it will die with me but I will preserve as much as I can and hope that someday down the road that my children or grandchildren will become curious and seek the past as I have.  

I come from people and a time when there was emphasis on where we came from and how we got to where we are.  My father will soon be eighty-seven years old and I've been gleaning as much history from him as I can over the past few years.  Today's attention is on the present.  Old is yesterday's emails, last year's hit songs.  I've been blessed with memory that enables me to have a living timeline embedded deep inside me.  Not just my timeline but I can see the origin and progression of my life and those around me like a chart in a history book.  I know when my first German ancestor came to America, when my French ancestors came to Quebec and where both migrated into the US and Canada.  I have family keepsakes from early last century and photographs from nearly a hundred years ago.  There isn't really any continuity on either the patriachal or matriarchal sides of my family that will keep these embers glowing and it's sad to think that over one hundred and fifty years of who we are and how we got here will most likely scatter with my ashes. 

My paternal grandparents had a huge wooden barn partially converted to a garage on their property and my maternal grandparents had a similar wood slatted detached garage, much smaller but of equal fascination to me as a young boy.  Both with dirt floors and nooks and crannies holding useful and useless things of endless magical fascination.  My mother's father had a box of racy paperback pulps, modest by today's standards with nary a word that couldn't be printed in a church newslater today.  But oh the phrasing, those were adjectives and sentences that could send a young man's heart to racing.  Those books, along with my uncle's collection of pornagraphic comic books that my cousin and I would sneak out to the garage with along with a cigar stolen the night before while he slept in his recliner in front of the TV would entertain us for hours, wide-eyed and puffing and coughing.  By twelve my sexual education was far advanced of anything any health class had to offer.  To this day I can pen erotica that does not have a word you can't say to your mother.  Just don't put them in the same order.  

I have hundred year old books, silver dollars from the 1800's, a Spanish silver piece of eight from a 1715 shipwreck off the coast of Florida.  I love holding things like this in my hand.  Some of the books were picked up from used booksellers from cities around the US and from dusty shelves in England and off a small stall on the Seine in Paris.  Some have inscriptions and I like to think about the people who gave and were given the prize of a book, long dead but briefly resurrected as I read their names.

It is said that you die twice, once with your last breath and again when your name is spoken for the last time.  As much as life is disposable these days I wonder if most of us will have much shorter second lives.

Some photographs from my recent travels that speak to my old soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I said Mrs. Thankfull Chapman's name aloud.  I wonder how long her second death had lay dormant.

 

 

 

Let us go then, you and I

I grow old...I grow old...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Eliot

Best read aloud, one of my favorites.

 

 

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's in your wallet?

 

A boarding pass, my emerald club card and a couple of crumpled bills

But that's a rocket in my pocket.

I've leased apartments for less time than I've spent in this hotel.  Home and again and back and home and again.  Over a hundred ups and downs.  

There is always more to do before you can do what you want.  Pay this off, get the kids through school so they can leave you at their discretion, not yours.  Save up, forget it, you will never have enough that's why they call it jumping.  I love jumping, free fall is the best.  We sometimes speculate, what would we be doing if we hadn't jumped.  I think it best to have jumped and lost than to have never jumped at all.

But jumping with the win(d) is best.  Better than against it.  But one shouldn't necessarily be discouraged by jumping against all odds.

 

love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

~Pablo Neruda

 

Do something dark today

 

 

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

 

Social networking is over rated and out of control.  It has no raw.

 

Do something raw today

 

Sometimes you have to show who you are rather than who you think they want you to be

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On our last episode.....

Long time no update.  Funny, I've heard from three old time bloggers in the past month.  Just seeing who is still out there and mentioning how much they miss the old days and how much impact the experience had on them.  None can say that more than I, maybe as much, no more.

I spent seven months in Texas after leaving Florida where I had been for five.  I've been in this job for going on sixteen months now.  It's a godsend but being away all week is difficult on a new marriage.  I've taken something like two hundred flights in that time and have spent at least that many days in hotel rooms.  Now I'm back in Florida, same place, same room, visiting the same company.  I love it here. Considering it is actually work it's as good a gig as one could have.  On the water, all expenses paid in a beautiful area with stellar weather.  There ya go.

We've been married fourteen months now, living in my/our house since early October.  The long and expensive immigration process has finally come to an end.  Green card on St. Patrick's Day, how appropriate, huh?  Green card actually received in the mail on the fifth anniversary of our meeting.  Five years seems like a fortnight at my age.  I've lived fast in those five years, several life changing decisions have been made, none that I regret.  I've always lived fast and while there are some things I probably should have done differently, it all has brought me to where I am now.

My wife, most of my family, and several of you I think hang out at facebook these days.  Not being a facebook type myself I've felt out of the posting loop but honestly there are very few posters or readers anymore.  Facebook is boring to me, I miss the raw, intimate bursts of expression, the sharing of that which can't be shared on the coffee clatch of social networking.  But those were different times, that was then, this is now.  

Maybe I'll think of something creative to say.  I miss how I used to write, I still think it but rarely put it to the written word.  I've looked back and realize how much of my stuff was over the top, but then I'm an over the top person so how surprising can that be.  

Cat and Shane, it was good to hear from you, you were there in a big way.  

I have probably lost track of some of you in the bloglines shift so if you are still posting send me your link, I'd love to keep track of you.  I still see Boo and the Naked One, sometimes Fly, but I've either lost track of the rest of you or you have lost track of yourselves.

Until next time which could be tomorrow or sometime toward the end of the year...