Illiterations: Laughing At My Own Expense

Hidden Chiquita Lake And, just like that, summer feels like the stirrings of Fall.  Most of the smoke from the wildfires has blown past us.  The sky is blue again.  Cloudless again.  Yes, the nights are cooling, and the fan is no longer needed in the bedroom at night.  The days are mostly lovely, though an occasional slightly-too-warm day arrives now and then. I'm fairly certain that just as I get comfortable with this trend, September will drop a heat wave on us once again.  I will accept it gladly, if I can make it to the houseboat for some swimming.  I have not had enough swimming in the lake this summer. I'm not sure why swimming in the lake is so much more meaningful than swimming in my own pool at my own home, but it decidedly is.  I love the moment the water closes over my head as I plunge into that very clear, deep green, lake water.  I think often as I swim around the boat about how far below me the bottom is.  Well over 80 feet where we are moored.  There i

Here we go again.... The old 1987 Whitesnake song resonates in my brain.  I loved that song, back when.  It made me think of letting go; of walking away from all that wasn't working in life; of freedom.  Have you heard it?  It's really a kinda powerful feeling. Now, Jeff and I are moving on.  Together.  Not leaving our long-loved home because of discontent per se, but just really because it's stopped fitting us.  I'm sad about that.  It is a special home, and we have been fortunate to enjoy it for a few years. Off to a project we hope will be the one that we set deep roots upon, and remain in for many years.  We will move to half as many square feet, and only two bedrooms to in which to fit the functions of sleeping and housing guests, execution of ever-shrinking hard office functions, and all our other living in general. What we gain is outdoor space.  While we have an admirable back yard now, it's still less than a half acre, and we only have room for

My mom, with my sister and me.  I'm the older sister.  Circa 1968. My mom and Jeff are sitting on the patio, working a crossword together.  It's nearly 8 pm, and finally, the incredibly still day is cooling.  We ordinarily get a breeze over the back fence, even on days when everybody else is roasting, but not tonight.  Even so, it's comfortable. I absent-mindedly follow along with their puzzle-solving.  I am a right-brain thinker, but also am a slight dyslexic, and learned at the age of 31, in college, that I have a visual processing deficiency that hindered my furthering my stellar GPA in my Junior year at UC Davis.  Not that that has really any bearing on my life now, other than, I really suck at crossword puzzles. As they joke and make silly guesses, these closet crossword experts work the New York Times puzzle in pen.  My mom is my language and etymology guru.  She studied Latin in college, and as we grew up, she would use our own questions to help us learn.

Another thing that all Americans seem to envision in conjunction with thoughts of Cuba is the time capsule of old cars that we hear about.  Yes, they are old.  We saw very few recent model cars.  The truly vintage--1950's--cars are mostly all rebuilt, and have been painted very bright colors.  I think Cuban taxi owners have realized how iconic those cars are, almost the entire world over, and so they keep them looking beautiful, and are paid handsomely for a taxi ride in one.  If you jump in any other taxi, it will be a tiny, boxy, also brightly colored car of Russian manufacture.  They look a bit like the 1970's Fiat 4-door cars.  I enjoyed capturing pictures of these cars in the settings that looked also right out of a by-gone era.  One of my favorite is the photo of a vintage American sedan in front of several brightly colored 1940's Art Deco apartment buildings. Vintage American car in front of 1940's era architecture. Here are a few of my favorite finds:

Before I went to Cuba, one thing I worried about was that I would see suffering.  Particularly animals suffering.  In fact, I never saw even one instance of mistreatment or neglect in the entire time we were there.  The first day, walking through Old Havana as a group, I saw a loose dog.  It was friendly with everyone, and yet looked as though it was by itself.  I asked our guide, who had studied in the U.S. and so was fluent in English.  He claimed, "Cuba's dogs belong to everyone, and everyone looks out for them."  I could  not  get my brain around that.  I feared that he was just trying to paint a rosy picture.  So, I began noting how all the dogs looked, everywhere we went.  Then I began noticing all the horses, and chickens.  Everybody--the creatures--were healthy, albeit certainly not fat.  Well, perhaps there were even some fat dogs. This little lady was hanging out at a Santeria House that we visited.  She was one of many hairless dogs we spotted! A place w

Our travels were not limited to the Havana region.  Our group set off for Las Terrazzas, a nature reserve in the Artemiso Province that was declared a designated bioreserve by UNESCO in 1984.  Prior to that, Cuba had, on its own, begun a reforestation effort there in 1968.  The region contains some of Cuba's earliest coffee plantations, now home only to the undergrowth that reclaims it.  One mountaintop plantation and processing center is kept neat and tidy for tourists to visit and learn about the early coffee growing industry and the people who worked the site. Las Terrazzas is a place out of another time.  Of course, it is intended to be, yet, I felt entirely transported.  I was in a world when Cuba was a cross-roads for many European countries trading with the west indies, attracting people from all corners of the world.  Moving from the quiet, rare air of the plantation that bears the same name, we arrived in the greenest, lushest, valley community of Las Terrazzas.  Before

Today, a California Highway Patrol officer died as the result of an accident in the line of duty.  It was not his accident.  He was simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time.  He was on a traffic stop.  The driver of the stopped vehicle was also killed. I am a highway patrol wife.  I have not been to as many funerals as some, certainly, but I have been to my share.  I think the families and the wives carry the pain of the loss long after the officers have put the loss in its proper place.  They keep it in the place of honor; of the status of the fallen; the place where one keeps the memories of soldiers and heroes. Every time an officer is lost, I see his face and I know that I knew him (or her) even if I never met the officer.  I know the family; the wife or partner of the officer.  It is losing a family member, even when we weren't acquainted. I know the young wives are even more affected by these tragedies.  They are freshly married.  Freshly in love.  Their children

Thank you, National Geographic of my childhood, for my crystal-clear memories of engaging, intriguing, "differentness" delivered to me as a young girl in the mid-1960's.  Delivered, I note, by way of the rich beauty and stark reality contained in the photo-essays of your journalists of that era as they scouted out the vast wonders around the globe. Thank you, for planting in my little-girl recollection the story of Cuba in the 1960's.  Cuba, when all of its pain and its Socialist ideals were new.  When neither the US, nor Cuba, had any idea that the rift between us would span five decades.  Five decades, and counting. In those times, the magazines showed gritty black and white photos of old men sitting on the front terraces of small stone houses, wearing broad-brimmed hats and clenching fat cigars between their teeth.  Little girls peered from back seats of passing Chevy Bel Aires.  Dogs lounged in dirt roads. I reflect on my having been intrigued by these store

Anybody here can scroll just a few posts down and see (embarrassingly to me) that I began this blog in 2005.  WHAT??  Yup.  I have always been a frustrated writer and even a bit of an artist, but I couldn't be disciplined.  Well, I could at some things, but writing juices come and go. So, my long-time pal, Sid is doing an amazing job at first creating and then posting to a new blog and she is holding herself accountable for once a day.  Again I say, "WHAT???"! I like the idea, I've tried this before, and so, I am going to give it a run.  Please don't keep count for me, I can do that. Today's post is just a gathering of the kindling; a sparking of the pilot light.  I promise to do better.  And, more.  Exercising your accountability muscles are scary, and necessary.  One fantasizes about growing in ways unimagined.  Forgive me for also pulling old blog posts of my on other pages into this one.  I think I will do this.  I just want a record; all in one p