Remember me? I blog here. Yes, it’s been a minute since I last posted. That’s a long, busy, mostly happy story. But I’m back and checking in from New Zealand. 

Here’s the deal on our latest venture. Mark and I squirreled away United Airlines points for a decade or so in anticipation of this trip. A few months ago, we spent most of them for two round trip Business Class seats/lie flat beds, teed up three weeks in NZ and three in Australia, and packed our bags. We left Austin last Sunday for San Francisco and thence to Auckland, toasting our 1.2 million miles with the preflight champagne offered in Business Class before takeoff.

So here we are, having pretty much skipped Monday (not necessarily a bad thing) on our way over the Pacific and landed in God only knows what time zone we’re in. 

And now we’re down under, having visited friends of ours in Whangārei and friends of a friend in Nelson. (In the Māori language, Nelson is called Whakatu. Since “wh” is pronounced as our “f” in Māori, I’ll leave it to you to figure out why this is funny in English.) We also took a gorgeous cruise in Abel Tasman National Park yesterday, viewing jaw-dropping scenery, admiring ferns as tall as trees, oohing and ahhing over sleeping seals, and cramming the rails to watch dolphins frolic near our boat. One dolphin, obviously a teenage male, was following the boat way too closely and breaching spectacularly high alongside. My theory is that the dolphin didn’t care squat for our opinions but was trying hard to impress a nearby girl dolphin.

As fun as this trip is, it’s been a bit disorienting. Of course, all travel disorients you somewhat – gender may be a construct, but jet lag is real. And don’t get me started on trying to remember where the bathroom is in your third hotel room in as many nights (although let me hasten to add that I’ve always found it in time). The worst, though, is how different showers can be. Some, of course, are the easy peasy pull the handle and water comes out kind. There’s no problem there. But then there are the ones that should come with instruction books the size of the ones in your rental car. We had on in Reykjavik that I never did figure out. I’d just pull, push, and turn things until water came out. It’s like Heraclitus said: I never stepped in the same shower twice.

New Zealand, though, presents me with a whole new level of brain Whakatus. First of all, I’ve shared the driving with Mark – on THE LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD. I’ve been a passenger like this before, but never a driver. Rationally, I know that I’m fine if I just keep my car in its lane and trust that all the other drivers will do the same. That’s my hominid brain’s position on the undertaking. Meanwhile, my fear-driven primitive brain is screaming “YOU’RE IN THE WRONG LANE AND YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!” at all times. That’s disconcerting, to say the least, and quite wearing as well. No wonder I’ve taken so many naps here.

Likewise, I’m a bit startled by various things for sale here. I shouldn’t be; I’ve been to markets in Asia and Latin America, for heaven’s sake. But when we strolled through a food and crafts market in Nelson – I bought really cute earrings made from NZ postage stamps – we came upon a vendor selling, of all things, dried goat tracheas. That was a cause for pause. And it’s very common to find knitwear shops selling garments made of possum fur. Possums are invasive predators here, so I guess it’s good to use up the animals people kill. However, we passed on the possum and went for more familiar merino wool socks.

The most existentially mind-bending thing for me, though, has been the whole question of what continent we’re on. I’d always assumed that (a) every piece of land was assigned to a continent, like all students were assigned to a home room in high school, and (b) New Zealand was assigned to Australia. (Sorry, Kiwi friends!) That would be a big fat noperino on both scores. Some places aren’t on continents, which simultaneously makes geographical sense and offends my sense of orderliness. To make matters worse, New Zealand is ascribed by most geologists these days to a 94% submerged continent called Zealandia. But there’s a big debate about: whether you can call a mostly-submerged landmass a continent, and, if you can, how many continents there are – seven, eight, and nine are the numbers being bandied about. Dammit. I distinctly recall making a 100 on my “Name the Seven Continents” quiz in third grade geography. How hollow that victory rings now. And I was just beginning to get used to Pluto not being a planet. 

So the bottom line is that you definitely should see New Zealand if you can, but you can expect to be surprised when you do. But then travel always does that, doesn’t it? It makes us see that the world is different than we thought and that maybe you shouldn’t be quite so wedded to what you think you know. So bring on the broader horizons, you lovely Kiwis, and continue to show me the Upside of Down Under.

The title is, of course, an homage to Nancy Drew. But this blog post isn’t about girl detectives; it’s about coincidence, family, history, curiosity, politics, and sorrow. (Are you hooked yet? That’s the purpose of an introduction.)

The family part comes first. Mark and I are currently in Indianapolis, visiting our daughter Mary. A couple of days ago, Mark received an email from one of his uncles. This fellow is the family genealogy buff, and he wrote about discovering that their shared many times great-grandfather was buried in Indianapolis. Thus, coincidence.

Apparently said many times great-grandfather, Wiley J. Hendon, was a Confederate soldier. He served in the Clark’s 14th Infantry during the Civil War and was captured. Hendon was sent to a POW camp here in Indy. He died there on April 1, 1864 and was buried in a wooden casket in a field with other POWs. Seventy years later, the POW graves were moved to a different cemetery. By that time, the remains could not be identified, so they were interred in a common grave. According to Mark’s uncle, the city erected a monument to the dead Confederate prisoners in a local park and put up headstones with the men’s names and information in the cemetery where they were buried.

Naturally, we were curious. Mary was at work, so we drove out to Garfield Park to find the monument. The internet provided a handy picture of the monument and stated that it, fittingly, I guess, was close to the Southern Street entrance. But we couldn’t see it anywhere. Finally we stopped and hiked over to ask a young woman who was watering a bed of flowers. “Oh,” she said, “It’s not here any more. They took it away a couple of years ago. It’s in a warehouse somewhere, and all that’s left is a circle and some random boxwoods.” She gestured towards a road. We thanked her and walked back to the car, processing the fact that Mark’s family, our children’s family, was now part of a hot contemporary political debate about removing Confederate monuments from our public spaces. We did find the empty circle and the random boxwoods, by the way.

Humor helps. After making the requisite Raiders of the Lost Ark jokes about artifacts in warehouses, we drove to the Crown Hill Cemetery. Our online guide let us know that the gravesite was near Benjamin Harrison’s memorial, so we followed the signs there and soon found the Confederates. The pictured memorial – ironically surrounded by American flags – marks the site of several ground markers with prisoners’ names, regiments, and dates of death. Included on the listings were two “Negro servants” whom I suspect we were enslaved men. The regiments are sorted by state, so we found Wiley without too much trouble. We stood there for a bit, in the shady, peaceful spot marking the grave of so many men who died as a result of cruelty and violence.

By the way, Benjamin Harrison’s memorial is very nice. Apparently the local Garden Club keeps it supplied with flowers and a wreath.

So here we are at the sorrow, folks. Let me be clear: neither of us is sorry that the monument in the park is gone. History has not been erased; it’s been put right. No one should glorify the Confederacy or the people who fought for it. The men who died in its service are named and buried, part of the national tragedy that is the history of race in America, and they serve as an object lesson in how not to treat other people. That, and the fact that my precious Mark wouldn’t be here if not for the man in that grave, is Wiley’s legacy.

So Mark and I agree that we’re sorry that our ancestors held people in slavery, that they lived in a society where that action wasn’t just normalized but was seen as an economic necessity and a mark of prestige. And although neither of us feels responsible for those people’s choices, we do feel responsible for doing our bit to change contemporary racial dynamics. And part of that is saying here that we’re people affected by the removal of the Garfield Park monument, and we applaud that action. And I’m glad that the cemetery is there, so that we can know a little more about the family before us. Rest in the peace you denied others, Wiley.

Mark and I have spent the past few days in northern Italy at lovely Lake Como. This place deserves its reputation as a gorgeous spot. White, puffy clouds laze around the tops of green Alps. Sunshine sparkles on the emerald blue of the lake. We have a darling little apartment a stone’s throw away from the lakeshore. We’re spoiled for choice in restaurants and bars and have been getting around nicely in our rental car and on the boats carrying passengers around the lake. Of course I’ve posted pictures on Facebook, receiving kind comments in return. But one of these responses has bugged me this week. It was “It’s just perfect!”

Now, I know that this reaction is actually just a bit of hyperbole, because everyone knows that nothing on this planet is actually perfect. I think. But what troubles me about this kind of statement, though, is that somehow it plants a niggling little suggestion in your mind that something out there is perfect, and that if your experience it as less than perfect, there’s probably something wrong with you.

So instead of telling you how perfect Lake Como is, I’m going to tell you some of the imperfect stuff from our trip.

1. Our apartment may be adorable, but the hot water in the shower strongly resembles the Holy Spirit: it comes and goes as it will. No amount of futzing with the temperature control fixes this problem. All you get for your trouble is the opportunity to endure more blisteringly hot/teeth-chatteringly cold spray. And all of this is happening in a space roughly the size of the average Amazon box, so there’s no place to hide.
2. We’ve had a couple of very mediocre meals here. For example, my lunch on the first day in Como featured lukewarm green beans and a cod “hamburger” that consisted of two small rounds of grilled fish complete devoid of any flavoring. I ate it, over the objections of my taste buds, because breakfast had consisted of two and a half brownies at 3:20am.
3. The roads here are crazy. The main road on our side of the lake is narrow – okay, Mark has driven narrow before, like in Ireland – BUT EVERYONE IS DRIVING TWICE THE POSTED SPEED LIMIT. Motorcycles and scooters routinely appear out of nowhere to cut around cars, cars dash around curves on the theory that on the whole it’s better just to get them over with, and people walk in the streets because there’s no place else for them to walk. It’s a perfect traffic storm, and I’ve missed some great scenery because my eyes are squeezed shut a fair bit of the time.
4. People who told me I’d understand a lot of Italian because I understand a lot of Spanish lied to me. For example, we’ve frequently seen road signs that say “Ignitzio cantieri” and then, a bit later, “Fin cantieri.” Since “cantar” means to sing in Spanish, I assume we’re supposed to break into song during these intervals in our journey. So far I’m just humming a little and hoping that’s enough to keep the police at bay. Those dudes carry very large guns, and they all look like they’re about 12 years old. Firearms and puberty are never a good mix.
   
   So life at Lake Como isn’t perfect. But you know what? We’re still having a blast. The scenery is wonderful. Our apartment has a comfortable bed, a working refrigerator, and a darling little terrace covered in grapevines. We’ve had some spectacular wines and cheeses and even did a wine tasting at a small family vineyard today with three guys from Germany and a couple from Switzerland. (I’m still wondering about the bona fides of the guy in the couple, because he told me he runs a beach bar for a living. Do they have those in Switzerland?) Nobody has hit anybody or anything on the road (yet), and I’ve pretty much decided to stick to “grazie” and “toilet” in the local tongue.
   
   Apparently, then, I don’t need perfection in my life. Give me good enough and I’m a happy camper. There’s real pain and tragedy in this world; trying to focus on the good is the best trick I’ve got up my sleeve to deal with it. Como what may! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one.)
   

A couple of weeks ago, Mark and I went with some friends to dance at The Broken Spoke. It’s been a minute since I had a hand stamp, so I thought I’d share this picture with you.

The Broken Spoke, for the uninitiated, is a decades-old honky tonk in Austin. It’s a little less honky than some places; for example, there’s no chicken wire between the patrons and the band to protect the musicians from beer bottles, fists, chicken fried steaks, and other potential missiles. But the Spoke still has a creaky wooden floor, mixtures of all sorts of uncomfortable chairs at the tables, and a lot of beer flowing, despite the face that the building is now surrounded by high rise condos and apartments. On a given night, all sorts of folks will be dancing there. You can tell the serious couples because they have on matching outfits – or Stetsons, as was the case of a black-hatted couple the night we were there. As usual, some of the dancers were giggling, some were grimly determined, and more than a few were very well lubricated indeed. We had one particularly notable couple in that last category. They were dancing without leaving the requisite room for the Holy Spirit between them, but that wasn’t enough for the guy in the couple. He made a grab for his partner’s ass during a turn and nearly dumped both of them on the floor. In a feat of unparalleled upper body strength and sheer drunken mulishness, his partner managed to get them upright again. It was an impressive display on her part. I almost clapped.

Now, this wasn’t the first time I’d been there. I have some history with the Spoke. Bear in mind that I attended a grand total of zero dances in junior high and high school. But it’s sort of a law that you have to go to the Spoke at some point if you’re in Austin. I first went there as an undergraduate at the University of Texas in the late 1970s. Other than the facts that I: 1) didn’t like beer then; 2) disliked country music; and 3) couldn’t dance, it was great. After a halfhearted attempt to master the Cotton-Eyed Joe (a line dance) and only learned enough to yell “Bullshit!” at the right time in the dance, I declined further invitations for, well, decades.

The problem – or the providence, depending on how you see it – is that I married a guy who likes to dance and is actually quite good at it. For many years, I was sufficiently self-conscious about dancing that I’d only do so in public if we were with people I’d never see again. So, for example, I’d happily dance on cruises. That’s been lots of fun. One memorable cruise dance happened while we were on the Norwegian coastal ferry in December 2013 to see the Northern Lights and decided to visit the lounge when our evening’s entertainment, a Swedish guy with an electronic keyboard, was playing and singing. It turns out he knew half of the lyrics to “Crazy,” so Mark and I gamely tottered about on the pitching dance floor; said floor was only about the size of two card tables, but we had fun. And last February we danced in the lounge area on our Nile cruise boat, attired in gallebayas and eventually joined by the guys tending bar. That was fun, too.

But I got braver over the years. I’ve danced at several weddings now, including our daughter and son-in-law’s (and we knew we were going to see them again) and at a few fundraisers and charity events. I still am about as graceful as a moose and have a tendency to try to wrest the lead from Mark, but about a decade ago I had an helpful epiphany about dancing. You know how many people in the whole universe care whether I can dance well? One. Me. No one else gives a flip. And then a couple of years ago I had another epiphany. You know how many people even notice how I dance? One. Me. (Maybe Mark if I step on his feet.) On the dance floor, I’ve quit caring how little people might think of me, because I realized that they were thinking of me so very little. This is truly liberating.

So you know what? I’ve decided that what I’ve learned about dancing applies to a lot of other areas of life as well. I have crooked teeth, but I’m going to smile in pictures. I laugh too loudly but feel free to guffaw when something amuses me. I have wrinkles and age spots, but phooey on makeup. I’m going to wear sandals whether or not my toenails are polished and jeans because they’re comfortable and bright colors because they make me happy. If anybody has a problem with that, they’re welcome to keep that tidbit to themselves.

So the next time you’re feeling awkward or self-conscious or too old for something, feel free to join me in not giving a shit. Instead, visualize me holding out a hand to you as the band begins to play. It’s our song, folks. Come dance with me.

It’s probably pretty clear from previous entries in this blog that I like to read. A lot. In fact, a psychologist I met at church once noted that we all had obsessions, and I confessed that mine was books. She paused, looked at me and said, “Well, there are a lot worse ones to have.”

She was undoubtedly right, but I have another, slightly less obvious obsession. I love playing online games.

Now, playing games is an old, old practice. Our tour guide in Egypt brought that message home when he pointed out faint markings scratched in the stone walks surrounding a temple where ancient Egyptians came to be healed. The squares were a game, which patients etched in the walkways where they sat and waited. I can just imagine mothers trying to distract sick, bored, and wiggly children. Been there, done that, in many a doctor’s office. A moment of sympathy flashed across the millennia between us.

Slightly more recently, I played lots of games as a kid. Some of these were games my mother made up to keep us from getting too restless while we waited for the doctor to appear, the dentist to finish, the tennis lesson to end, whatever. My favorite was always seeing how many words you could make out of one word. (I’m pretty good at Wordle now, partly as a result.) And we played a boxed game she had as a kid. It was called Fibber McGee and Molly and was based on an old radio show. Basically it’s the same idea as MadLibs, which we played in the car with our kids for ages.

Some of the board games my family had included really obscure ones, like Video Village, which was a version of a TV show, and Broker, which dealt with the stock market and which my brother adored. (FYI he rebelled against capitalism en toto in the 1960s, but that might just have been a coincidence.) I like Clue – I still love mysteries – and a game called Careers, where you could become an actor or a farmer or astronaut, etc., etc. You got points for endeavors in your field. I loathed Monopoly and still do to this day. I played with my sister, who’s several years older than I am and was (and still is) a wee bit competitive. When I was five and she was 11, let’s just say that she understood a lot more about real estate (not to mention addition and subtraction) than I did. Scars remain.

In high school, my friends and I played a lot of Spades in between rounds at speech tournaments and, as old-fashioned as it sounds, Charades at parties. Note: do not let debate partners play on teams in these games. They spend so much time with each other that they kind of know what the other person is thinking. Sadly, I was never invited to a party where we played Spin the Bottle. But I’ve been happily married for 37 years now, so I guess I made up for lost time.

The games I play now are pretty much online. I miss some of my old standards, like Joy Garden, Rocket Mania, and Cradle of Rome. But fear not, for I’ve found other fun ways to spend my time. I still like Tetris and Candy Crush, and I sometimes play a hidden objects game called Seekers Notes. I’m mad at the SN folks, though, because they double charged me on an in game purchase and have basically blown off my complaint. My current obsession is a parking lot game, where I happily move tiny electronic vehicles out of the way of walls, fire hydrants, mailboxes, and sneaky little old ladies who walk around the parking lot and turn abruptly in front of ongoing cars. If you hit a little old lady, you lose, but if you only hit her walker, you get extra points. That’s a bit perverse, but there you are.

Now, here’s the point that always kind of surprises me about playing online games. When you tell someone who also plays them, you generally have a pleasant conversation ahead. But when the other person doesn’t share your taste for such pursuits, you generally get a rather acidic response along the lines of, “Oh, I don’t do that. It’s such a huge waste of time.”

Why is having fun wasting your time?

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve worked hard in my life. I studied hard to get good grades as a kid and participated in lots of demanding extracurricular activities. I put myself through college and law school and did pretty well in both. Post school, I was a wife, a mom, a practicing lawyer, and a law professor and administrator. But I’ve always tried to make room for fun; it’s what feeds me, what makes it possible to get up and do it again the next morning. Whether it’s reading, or watching movies, or traveling, or hanging out with friends, fun is restorative and energizing and comforting. In fact, Mark and I still quote Dr. Seuss to each other, even after all these years: “Such things are fun, and fun is good.”

So here’s to fun – and games! And if you ever want to play a rousing game of Clue, just let me know. But be warned: if you want to play a rousing game of Monopoly, you’re out of luck with me. But I will give you my sister’s address.

Having recently returned from a trip to Egypt, I can assure you that the languages there are quite different from ours. Duh, you may be saying now, since the primary language there is Arabic, and the old language was written in hieroglyphics. But the languages of the streets, especially in Cairo, run as deep and as varied as the channels of the Nile.

Some of the street languages are what you’d might expect. Vendors are everywhere, for example, hawking everything from little pyramids made of stone to friendship bracelets made of plastic beads. They cry out, “Brother! Cousin! My lady!” as you walk by them; one guy even yelled out “Hey, cowboy!” when Mark wore his (Canadian-made) Tilley hat one day. Too, five times a day you hear the muezzin calling faithful Muslims to prayer. And engines are everywhere. Cars, trucks, buses, minivans, tuk tuks, and heaven knows what other vehicles careen through the streets, passing each other with mere centimeters to spare and blithely ignoring lane lines, traffic signs, and the few stop lights that dot the Egyptian roadways. It’s an urban symphony.

But the streets also have languages that we don’t recognize, much less understand. Our guide in Alexandria opened our ears to one such tongue when he asked us to listen to the rhythm of the horns being blown by various vehicles. Sure, some blasts were your run-of-the-mill outraged lean on the horn, expressing indignation at some irksome maneuver by another driver. But if you listened carefully, you could hear that a few patterns were repeated by multiple vehicles. Our guide explained that those patterns had specific meanings. One series, for example, bleated out the rhythm of the words “I love you” in Arabic; drivers honk this out at attractive women. (Sigh.) The only sequence I remember, though, is four short blasts, one long one, and one short one. This is the cadence of someone saying “Son of an —-hole” in Arabic. I decided to learn that one because it might come in handy someday on Interstate 35. Travel is so broadening.

The other street language we learned about involved hand signals instead of horns. To understand this one, you need a little background information. For one thing, many people ride minibuses that run regular, self-appointed routes. One minibus might, for example, go up and back from Tahrir Square to the municipal building where residents pay their water bills. For another thing, people walk in the streets, hail transportation from the streets, and have long conversations in the streets. Sidewalks are for sissies and for parking cars on. Go figure. Anyway, people who want to grab a minibus that is going on the municipal building route stand in the street and make a pumping motion with their hands. The driver of the minibus keeps an eye out for this signal, stops to pick up the passenger, and everyone goes on their way. (Apparently the sign for a ride to the pyramids is to make a little triangle with your thumbs and forefingers, which I thought was rather cute.) Mind you, the driver is doing all of this while navigating the maelstrom of Egyptian traffic, smoking, and talking on a cell phone – all at the same time. It’s no wonder these people were able to build the pyramids; they appear to have six or seven hands apiece, all of which are busy at any given time.

So if you’re lucky enough to get to travel to Egypt, be sure and keep an eye and an ear out for the language of the streets. The country has much to say, if only we know how to listen.

I admit to being a big “Downton Abbey” fan, and a large part of that is due to the snarky Dowager Countess. Magnificently played by Maggie Smith, Violet Crawley is the queen of one-liners. Who wouldn’t love a character with quips like these? “I’ll take that as a compliment,” says her visitor. The DC responds, “I must have said it wrong.”

One of my favorite lines from her comes in response to a remark made in the first season, when the new heir to Downtown Abbey, Matthew Crawley, is talking about how he intends to continue practicing law as he learns the ropes of running an estate. He notes that he will be available to do the latter during evenings and weekends. As you can see from the picture, Violet is ready to remind Matthew of the chasm between the aristocracy’s existence and his plebeian world. She leans across the table and inquires, “What is a week-end?”

Classic.

I’m writing about this remark because Mark and I are about to leave on a vacation – I think. I mean, I’m sure we’re going somewhere; tickets for a tour of Egypt are booked, flights are scheduled, and our bed is covered with stuff to pack. But the word “vacation” implies that you’re getting away from something. When you’re retired, as we are, there’s no job to escape. When you live in apartment overlooking the Mediterranean and spend your time reading and hanging out with friends, there’s not a lot about your current situation to want to get away from. So we’re taking a trip, but are we taking a vacation?

Let me know if you figure this one out. In the meantime, I’ll be shoving travel pants into my suitcase and trying to think of witty ripostes to use on our fellow travelers. Wish me luck!

You have no idea how ironic this picture is and why Johnny Cash ought to be in it.

Let me explain. Mark and I recently visited Mallorca. Famous as the playground of the rich, this lovely island has it all: beaches, mountains, castles, and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. But what Mallorca, and specifically this place, got me thinking about was the contrast between the walls we build and the sea surrounding us.

I began musing on this topic when we visited Bellver Castle, situated on a mountain near Palma. To be sure, visiting a castle in Spain is kind of like going to a Starbucks in the USA – the buildings are everywhere, and what’s for sale inside is generally overpriced. Bellver commands gorgeous views of Palma and the sea, as the picture above shows. The castle was built in the 1300s as a defensive position and a residence for King James II of Mallorca. But the buildings have a darker side as well. Political prisoners deemed too seditious to be let loose in society were held there. These prisoners were to be found as late as the 20th century, when two Catalan leaders were imprisoned there before they were shot.
And what did those shut up in the castle look on, day and night? The sea. The beautiful, ever-moving sea, where for thousands of years human movement from one place to another has been going on, day and night. And much of that movement has been about politics.

Many the journeys across Mare Nostrum, as the Romans called the Med, were, of course, commercial in nature. Traders have sailed these waters for thousands of years, carrying cargo in everything from wine skins and amphora full of of olive oil to modern shipping containers stuffed with TVs from China and designer clothing stitched up in Vietnam. If you ever visit us, we will take you to Cartagena to see the renowned Museum of Underwater Archaeology. This gem of a museum will give you a good look at commerce in our sea.

But many Mediterranean voyages involved politics. Certainly these were sometimes cast as exploration or pilgrimage. For example, Phoenicians sailed to Cadiz to recreate their fine cities on its hooked peninsula. Cleopatra sailed her exotic painted ships to Rome to visit Julius Caesar. (That went well.) Saint Paul sailed in the Mediterranean, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not. Later, Crusaders climbed aboard ships and set their eyes on the Holy Land, where they hoped to carve out territory for themselves in this life and the next. And many political voyages were more overt. The Greeks sailed for Troy, Hannibal ferried his elephants from Africa, Roman galleys moved troops and governors across the waves, Napoleon and the English battled up and down the coasts, Germans and the Allies struggled for supremacy. The list is almost endless, but you get the idea.

It’s worth noting the cost of these voyages. Most of them succeeded, but many others did not. Innumerable shipwrecks, ranging in age from prehistory to the present day, litter the sea floor.

Perhaps the most compelling sea stories of all, though, are about the refugees who’ve sailed this sea. We teach some of these stories in literature classes. When Troy fell (more walls), Virgil tells us that brave Aeneas and a tiny remnant of his family sailed for Italy to try to start over. Much more recently, on the sun-drenched beaches of Mallorca, Spanish Republicans escaping from Franco launched every boat they could find and headed to relative safety in France. A few years later, many in France would sail to neutral Spain or Africa to flee from the Nazis. And in our own times, desperate refugees from Africa and the Middle East clamber into leaky, overcrowded watercraft to escape war and poverty and, perhaps, find a better life in the EU or, ultimately, other parts of the world. The sea has always offered a way to move, to escape, to evade the strictures of the walls people construct.

Which brings us back to irony and Johnny Cash. Cue the Man in Black and his classic “Folsom Prison Blues,” where the prisoner in his cell hears a train whistle and laments, “But those people keep on movin’, and that’s what tortures me.” So here we are. Hello walls – and the sea beyond.

Yes, January 4 was that one. But apparently somebody will still need me and feed me.

January 4 is actually a funny birthday. On one level, it’s unfortunately right after Christmas and New Year’s, so people are kind of over celebrating. And I can’t count the number of times we went back to school on my birthday. On the other hand, when I was a kid, my mother – every year – would buy me toys and such “for Christmas and birthday,” feel generous and put them all under the tree, and then go buy a new set of birthday presents at after-Christmas sales. That was kind of sweet. So it all depends on how you look at it. In fact, I once worked with a guy who told me in passing how much he hated his birthday, and I told him I loved mine. It turns out we were both born on January 4. I think about that a lot.

Anyway, fast forward to this year. Turning any blank-4 age means going from early in the decade to mid-decade, and I notice that more as I age. And my body lets me know I’m older: my eyesight has worsened, my left hip protests when I first get out of bed, and I appear to be building a defensive barrier of jowls around my neck. So there’s a trepidation associated with birthdays now that didn’t used to be there. This is normal, presumably, although not necessarily terribly comforting.

I ended up having a really lovely day, though. Many friends and family members sent electronic greetings; some of my buddies from Democrats Abroad Spain even put together a montage of video greetings, which really made my day. Friends in France sang “Happy Birthday” in a snowy video from Montpelier, and of course the kids were in touch. Mark bought me a beautiful bouquet of flowers. We capped the day off with a dinner at a local restaurant with 14 lovely friends. The wine flowed, people chatted, and I got more hugs and kisses than any human being deserves. Chocolates and limoncello might also have been involved, but I’ll never tell. And a couple of dear friends in Murcia violated my injunction against presents and gave me a beautiful necklace that I’ll treasure forever. What great people, and what a great day!

And that’s actually my takeaway from this birthday: joy is corporate. My happiness is bound up in this lovely community of friends and family, both near and far. This conclusion surprises me a little, since I think of myself as a bit of a loner, off in the corner with a book. But my dizzyingly happy day was all about being with others and the pure pleasure that brought. Maybe this old dog can still learn a few new tricks.

I’ll leave you with one final image of my day. As we were getting ready for bed on the 3rd, I was a bit pouty-faced about changing ages. I’m old, said my brain; I’m old and I’m just going to keep getting older (duh, or keel over). Once again, my community saved me. My precious husband called up “When I’m 64” from his playlist, pulled me off my moody couch, and danced me around the room. That’s magic, folks, and I’m here to tell you it’s real. In fact, I’ve decided that next year’s birthday, should I be lucky enough to have one, is also going to be Beatle-themed. Except this time I’m going with “With a Little Help from my Friends.”

Hey, remember me?

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. I could recite the excuses I’ve been using on myself, but that would be both irrelevant and boring. Suffice it to say that I’m resolved to blog more this year.

I hope you had a lovely start to 2023. Mark and I spent it in Zurich, sort of accidentally. We’d booked a flight from the Midwest, where we’d been seeing our kids and granddaughter for Christmas, and we were supposed to connect through Zurich. A couple of months ago, though, the airline changed its schedule, and we ended up with a day’s layover in Zurich. And that day happened to be New Year’s Eve. Worse things have happened!

Mark found us a lovely little hotel in the center of the city, and we grabbed a cab from the airport to it as soon as we got through Customs. God love the people at this establishment, because the staff had our room ready at 9:30 in the morning. Naps ensued, followed by a city tour and more naps. Jet lag is real, people!

We had dinner at a lovely little Italian restaurant across the cobbled street from our hotel. And at the appropriate time, we wandered down to the river, stood on the bridge with thousands of our best friends, and watched fireworks displays all around. The crowning glory was the municipality’s fireworks display, which was launched out over Lake Zurich. It was spectacular, and we toasted midnight with cups of Glühwein, the hot spiced wine favored in both the German-speaking world and the Morris/Tullos household. On our way back to our hotel, we danced a bit to the tunes the DJs were spinning and just generally acted like goofy tourists out on the town. And of course I spoke Spanish to everyone who spoke German to me, because apparently several neurons in my brain are convinced that there’s only one foreign language in the world. Mark teases me about it, but he did it this morning as well. Perhaps the condition is contagious.

Anyway, that’s the report from New Year’s Eve. We’re now back in our apartment in Spain. I unpacked the can of black eyed peas that we schlepped across the Atlantic, so that we will have good luck this year. (I think we deserve extra for all of that hauling, but we will have to see if that comes to pass.) I wish you good luck and much joy this year as well.