A Sense of Expectation

I can feel my brow furrow. What is today good for and what will it bring? A friend came for a bbq and swim last weekend and we talked and laughed and ate and did I mention talked? No matter where the discussion led, work, books, social life, new hobbies, in crept the very real question of -- what do we want life to hold for us and where do we find it?  A more rhetorical question might be: Does the music come from the tip of the conductor's baton or from the harmonious chorus within?

Love Bunches

I read a drive-by yesterday, an internet article about menopausal women and the cheery news they should expect to gain 10-20 pounds. So THAT'S where it's coming from. I've been blaming all the romantic dinners out and entertaining friends around the pool munching on chips and dip. But like any red blooded American girl who can't see her feet, I long to be less than I am.

Our daughter recently lost 30 lbs and a neighbor is down 28, and a niece, 24, using various diets but all including exercise and eating a more modest amount. You know,  discipline.

Off Point

My mother once said the one thing she did better than anything else was be a friend. It was definitely one of her strengths. She carefully tended to relationships from all over the country, some of them for over 60 years. Her friends filled her radar screen with little loving blips.

It was here that I learned to recognize the rhythm of an enduring friendship and what makes it able to withstand the challenges of life. I could almost feel the precise moment when my own friendships moved from exceptional to enduring and I also came to know friendships that were adaptable and strong in spite of ourselves, or maybe because of it.

FB

It's an enticing idea, to be able to find and talk to people from your past from the convenience of your own desk. And I suppose it satisfies the most basic social aspects of an electronic society with just minutes to spare as they rush through their day. But it hasn't hit a very responsive chord in me.

An Old, Unfinished Blog

This was from February, and after I came down from the whirl of excitement from the wedding, it seemed good to edit and post it.

The memories are strong from the wedding and I will want to write of it forever. For one day, two really, it seemed like real life and imagination merged. How often does that happen?  Not often enough.

Ahead of time, we talked of wishes for the day, how we wanted it to be a time to join together families and give back in a gesture to celebrate them in our lives. And we actually were able to see those wishes come true in the wide smiles, conga lines, funny stories, laughter and general gladness.

On With It

One of the best parts of being a woman is being able to get my nails done. I love it. It feels really feminine to have them put all those chemicals to cover the chew bitten stumps that are there. It makes me want to wear high heels and skirts, not that I do.

The thought of being in a home based business keeps coming up because in this economy, it's a crap shoot to even find a job let alone to be paid fairly for an extensive skillset and years of experience. Ideas keep popping up and after a lot of research and tons of talking about it, something stops it from moving forward.

Me.

Enlightenment

My ex wrote the other day, a really nice letter addressed to me and the Mr but it was really for the boys. Do you think it is still courageous to extend an olive branch through an emissary rather than directly?

There is no doubt about the devastating experience of divorce and the lingering bitter aftertaste. It is a horrible event. From the euphoria of meeting and the intense commitment of marriage, it degrades into a proof-positive moment when you know you are expendable. It is a death and you grieve just as deeply.

Divorce is where the walls of our heart are the weakest and where broken promises litter the ground. Our children inexcusably suffer from our failure.

The Car

Italian trains

This is hard to admit being from the country that invented the automobile, but I have fallen out of love with it. Do I need to relinquish my citizenship? Until recently, I truly earnestly believed that to give up my car would give up my freedom. But no more.

Is gas an afterthought?

Our somewhat more organic trip of Europe included all public transportation. Planes, buses, lots of walking, metro/underground, Vaporetto (water buses), and the Eurail. This was going to be a real treat and with my husband's experience with public transit in San Francisco, I had faith we would get along.

Paris metro with map

I grew up in the suburbs and always loved the convenience of having a car. I biked a lot when I was younger, but my experience with public transit was limited to an extremely unsatisfactory Greyhound Bus trip to the Midwest and the occasional fun excursion on BART into The City. If someone took the bus, I always asked if their car was in the shop.

Typical express train

London Underground

Here, from my mouth to yours, is the truth about European public transportation: it is fun. It was fun figuring out the timetables and how to read the wall maps on the Underground. It was fun learning how to get from a train to a bus to a metro all in one day. It was even fun hauling luggage up and down stairs and over and under bridges and to discover trains have little luggage alcoves built in. We felt like a local as we sprung on and off boats in Venice and took ourselves down uneven stone streets on flimsy luggage wheels that held up remarkably well. We did, too!

Bldg on left is Venice
vaporetto bus stop

We met memorable people along the way. It was even ok to wait in lines for tickets and advice. It was good to recognize and appreciate the hard work of those who kept the trains on time, safe and clean. And the biggest discovery was the myth that this kind of travel is hard or inconvenient. A few American cities have put top notch public transit systems in place, but there are woefully few of them and often not self-sustaining by the people it serves.

 London street map

It was interesting to observe a public transit that attracts people from all walks of life, who good naturedly spend part of their day together every single day. The families we met have cars for weekend excursions but choose public transportation as a daily routine. The buses and trains and metros were clean and free of graffiti and vandalism. There was no trash in the aisles. There were no guards. It's as though traveling together breaks down the barriers within the community and brings out the best in them. They seem to recognize and respect the system itself, all things we appear yet to learn. 

Extreme Rome

And that brings me back to our insane love of cars. I returned home thinking how unfortunate it is to have such an affordable option as owning a car and being a solitary driver in a gas guzzler and willing to sit five lanes wide in traffic for hours without meeting or talking to or learning about anyone around us.

Life (and the environment) would be so much better off if we would.

Coach Natalie Randolph

FAN HOUSE
Article written by Michelle Smith, 6.7.2010, Senior College Sports Writer

Natalie Randolph knew it would be a "big deal" when she accepted the job as the head football coach at Coolidge High School in Washington D.C. She'd already had a taste of the attention and media coverage when she became an assistant coach on the football team at H.D. Woodson High two years before.

"Big deal" doesn't do this justice.

Randolph, 30, joins a handful of women serving as high school football coaches at any level. As for head coaches, it is believed there are only two -- Randolph and Debbie Vance, at Lehman High in the Bronx.

Garden Fairies

Memorial weekend is usually a pressure-cooker of plans and we are on the go either hosting or being hosted. After all, it is for families the official first long weekend of summer. Not this year: this year we found ourselves with absolutely nothing scheduled. Really: a weekend free to do anything at all??

The weather was sunny and perfect and with it so many options, and it seemed like it might be a non-productive type of weekend full of almosts. We almost drove to Yosemite because when was the last time we were there, I mean really. We almost went to the jazz festival which runs at various venues all over town but we like Old Town for its quaint buggy rides and wooden plank sidewalks and you can play dodge-the-metermaid. We almost went visiting and almost played Tripoley and almost went to the coast.

Any Other Way

It's really soothing and healing to have friends you can count on. I mean by that people who have hung out long enough for you to realize who they are and appreciate the fact that they have. My brother visited yesterday, a man of unique perspectives and a heart so big you can see it on the outside. He and I met through his brother, like a hundred years ago, and developed the friendship over the ensuing 30 years and when his brother's and my marriage dissolved we kept each other on as friends. I essentially won him in the divorce.

There are other friends like that, relationships with beautiful patina and dents and dings from the decades of active use and counted among the people that matter. One of them is always on my mind when I go to sleep at night, a time for quiet prayer and wishes of safekeeping.

Light Givers

I've not been myself lately and I am praying about peace and forgiveness to get relief from old weights I thought were buried and gone.  Nothing is happenstance and, for those that believe that, there are always lessons to learn or solutions to find, because sometimes a lesson takes a few times to take.

Some believe we are the architects of our own lives and help create foundations for those around us, some we love but also some we cannot see, all of us intertwined by chance or design or whatever you want to call it, and what I believe to be God and his Grand Design who knows much more than I what my purpose is and my contributions will be.

A Sadder and Wiser Man

I've been neglecting this blog with starting up a travelog (http://bushtreks.blogspot.com/) that is so much fun bringing up-to-date that I start looking through the dog-eared journal which has pulled out from the cover and torn up on one edge, and I think of all the places it went, and when eventually I do write it needs a few pictures for emphasis and there I go, weeding through the glorious thousands and before you know it the day is gone.

But today is about what it means to have the upper hand which isn't always the gift we think it is. And that life is really about taking the high road because that's the scenery you want around you.

My Ex works with our daughter, but he didn't know that until recently and found out quite by accident when the situation moved from quietly tolerable to 'in-'.

Outreach in Rwanda

Jana and Dave have been traveling on an outreach through their church to help stabilize and improve the lives of residents in a little town in Rwanda.  Here are some of her stories.

5/21 Saturday Afternoon in Kigali
We arrived last night having been fed on our hop from Nairobi to Kigali with our first taste of Rwandan food. Maurice and Jean Pierre greeted us, familiar and welcome faces. Our first change came immediately.

Our hotel was booked so they had found us other accommodations. We are now happily installed in The Diplomat Hotel, which I am finding very comfortable, even by U. S. standards. It's quiet, serene and centrally located. We went out into town with Maurice and his 4 kids. Our first stop, however, was at a walk-in clinic because Richard, his youngest, is ill.

A walk-in clinic here is nothing like it is in the US. An unpaved, pitted dirt road takes you into a space crowded with vehicles all parked randomly & blocking one another. Maurice disappeared for 10 minutes and came back w/paperwork that looked like a medical chart. We went into a plain covered concrete patio area where there were 2 doctors' offices, Generalists. A very tall, thin Rwandan doctor in a familiar white lab coat disappeared into one of the rooms. His nurse (?) came out and gathered Richard up and into the doctor's office. When I peeked in all I saw was a large bare room with a metal table and a small bed. Several minutes later Richard reemerged with his dad having received the good news that it was only a cold, not Malaria.

A Show of Cards

I was cleaning out the file cabinet -how long has it been, I wondered? - there are things in it dating back to the Middle Ages (my children's middle ages). Anyway in it was the most amazing letter. Most everything from the cabinet seemed to be old pay stubs and insurances I no longer have and it was in the heaping shred-it pile. But I was wrong.

I came across a letter from a high school friend with three young children and a loving husband and every reason in the world not to be dying of cancer in her 40s, but she was. She had been fighting it for nearly a decade, on two continents, a particularly elusive strain that was beaten back only to appear somewhere else and attack on another front.

Pop

Life is good: that's the consensus here after a weekend of visiting Pop and Arlene. After all his years of purposeful living, and age related health issues, he keeps at it.

Pop lived his life on the docks of San Francisco as a Longshoreman, and hard work that began long before he could complete school. Physical work can't help but wear down a man, that and raising six boys. I love to see the twinkle in his eye as he tells stories or teases one of his sons.

He is an accomplished artist and woodworker, with the most beautiful workbench downstairs with every kind of tool imaginable and everything in its place. He enjoys making trivets and beautiful mantles and toy boxes that fill our homes. He loves his boys, their wives, and his grandchildren.

A Hop Skip and a Jump

How do you like being in the Drawing Room? It seemed like a good time to show you more of the house.

I love libraries. You know, one of the best jobs is working in a library. Oh those bindings that crease from books being left open too long, and their sometimes musty woody pulpy smell mixed with dust just drives me crazy.

I heard the library in Woodland may be closing due to budget cuts and there is a vote on the June election ballot. The library that was part of our first date. The Carnegie library in this sleepy little town that can't possibly realize what a treasure it is or they would balance the budget another way.

The Ancients

Techie stuff is really cool and a great waste of a day when there's nothing else more enticing to do, like the windows and bathrooms. I spent this morning writing another travel blog of exciting things and to match up some of the photos. I wish I could still be paid by the hour for it. 

Randy is officially the Photo King. We have literally thousands of photos to sift through, identify and edit. Don't tell him I told you this, but once they were nestled together in files, they kind of look alike. But aren't they just the most wonderful shots? He has an undeniable knack at getting the right picture with the right lighting in the right angle at the right time. Our long walks sometimes resembled a leisurely stroll there was so much picture-taking going on.

To What End?

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." -- Charles Schultz

This was in my inbox today, sent by a friend who knew it would make me smile. We communicate this way now, friends just forwarding along little jokes to enjoy. I do it, too, when someone needs a pick-me-up or I know their style of humor well enough that it will be appreciated. As I type their name on the forward, I imagine their face as it spreads into a grin as mine had done.

Travel Blog

Why start another blog called There and Back Again? Travel changes us in subtle ways, according to my mother Joy who has traveled the globe with my father at her side. But for us, it was more than an internal shift and subtle dawning.

We decided on a trip where we arranged all the details. We assembled our trip one piece at a time, the Eurail, the hotels, the Metros and Undergrounds and Buses and sights and how long to stay. The process of planning the trip turned out to be a big part of the experience, and I wouldn't have believed that was true.

Travel and marriage share a commonality, that the journey is in letting go both inwardly and outwardly, and by doing that one cannot help but be changed. The research and exploration and immersion into other cultures during these weeks broadened our knowledge, deepened our appreciation, and humbled our hearts.

Says Cesare Paves: "Traveling forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it."

The gift of travel is in being able to see the delicate filament of life that brims and overflows and ties us together. We breathe life into wherever we are, taking the steps two at a time and memorizing routines in the world we know. But there is so much more, around every corner, across every sea, at the top of the mountains and in the rain forests, people just like us living and thinking and eating and loving as far as their imaginations go.

And so the magic of travel is also to be shown how close we are, how much the same, with shared dreams and wonderment. And that deserves its own home, these stories to be written down and remembered long after the details fade.

Whatever life is, it is vast and majestic and richly lived. That is the lesson of travel. That is the discovery we found.
 
http://bushtreks.blogspot.com/ (which is also linked along the side just under our photo)