I’m in kind of a things to see, places to go frame of mind.

From a road trip a very long time ago -- taken from the passenger seat!

While I’d love to go see the pyramids at the Giza plateau, and all the other fabulous wonders of ancient Egypt; and Chartres cathedral and the castles of the Loire valley in France; and the Greek and Roman sites from antiquity, there are still a lot of states I haven’t visited yet, and I’d like to see them first. When I start thinking about the ones I’ve already been to versus the ones I haven’t, the lists seem pretty equal, but let me see.

I’ve been to: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. That leaves: Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington (the state), Washington (DC), and Wyoming.

Now that I’ve got them all written down where I can count them I see the lists aren’t even after all. I’ve been in thirty of fifty states, and I mean, on the roads, driving. I’ve flown over some of the same ones, but I wouldn’t count that if that was all. To be honest, I’ve only driven through the southern part of New Mexico — several times — when I was in the Air Force and stationed in Arizona; and I only passed through South Carolina once when I was bringing the Old Guy home from North Carolina. For most of the others, I was there for part of a day, or, more often, for a weekend or longer because of a conference I was attending. I’ve spent the most time in Texas — I won’t say how many years — but I still haven’t seen all of it. I’ve been in Abilene, Midland, and points south and west, but not up into the panhandle.

Kentucky was my home for 14 years, and during the last four, when I worked for the state, I saw more of the state than I had during the previous ten. Kentucky has some great state resort parks with big lodges looking out over beautiful lakes. I recommend to anyone travelling to or through Kentucky to forget the hotels — stay at a park if you can, even if it’s a little out of the way.

While I was stationed in Arizona, I made several trips to California — to San Diego to see the zoo and Sea World, to the Los Angeles area (I went to that zoo, too, and Disneyland of course), and to the Central Valley, where I spent one summer leave with one of my AF buddies at her family home in Newman.  (The photo above is from that trip.) We took a day trip up to San Francisco while we were there, courtesy of her parents, and wandered through Fisherman’s Wharf, gazed out at Alcatraz, then crossed the Oakland Bay Bridge to have dinner in a restaurant overlooking the bay.

I love road trips. Even though there’s a destination waiting at the “end,” there are always surprises along the way, especially along roads I haven’t traveled before. It’s been a long time since I took a trip of the sort I used to, and I miss it. Considering the state of my car, not to mention my finances, it may not happen this year, again, or next, etc. But I can wish.

And for the equid enthusiasts out there...

Bet on the Bay

A do-over with different materials

I wasn’t altogether happy with my previous attempt to put this cat on paper, so I started over. So far, I’m liking it. Still a way to go. My source for the original photo, Brian Switek, has moved his primary blog, but the photo is still on the wall at the old place. I hope he likes this version.

I’ll be posting updates as I progress.

Tag

Precious

Long about his ninetieth birthday, he thought it would be cool to live to see his one hundredth birthday. He didn’t quite make it, checking out shortly before he reached 97. But he was already telling people he was “almost a hundred years old.” He was always of the opinion that, as soon as he reached his actual birthday, he could claim the year he was starting, not the one he just finished, as his real age. So, yesterday, if he had been around to turn one hundred years old, he would have started telling people he was really already one hundred and one. (I also suspect he would add another year on January first, because, after all, he had another birthday coming up eleven short months later.) Fortunately, for most of his life, he would reconcile all those numbers to something approaching his real age sometime between January and December, otherwise he would have racked up something in the neighborhood of 200 “invented” years of age during his 96 year life-span.

My dad spent 45 plus years as an accountant, and he never got that creative with “the books,” so how he came up with the math for calculating his age demonstrated an imagination that I didn’t always give him credit for. I think the times he grew up in, and the way his family and early environment shaped him, kept him from being able to express his real creativity and sensitivity. I’m not going to dwell on what he might have become “if only.” It’s counter-productive for me to do that for myself, and there’s no point in doing it for someone who’s no longer with us.

What I wanted to do, instead, was look back at what was happening the year my dad was born, and his first year of life, and contemplate the gulf of history he lived through. For instance, World War I started and ended before he turned seven. On the day he was born, December 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen’s expedition reached the South Pole.

Butterfly McQueen was born that year, as was Ronald Reagan, Jack Ruby, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Czeslaw Milosz, Ginger Rogers, and Lucille Ball.

In the early months of 1912, before my dad was even eating solid food, the Republic of China was established, New Mexico and Arizona were admitted as the 47th and 48th states (respectively). Thirty thousand workers walked out of textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts in what would become the most dramatic and successful labor strike in American labor history — the Bread and Roses Strike. A man named Albert Berry jumped out of a perfectly good airplane in flight, wearing a parachute, to prove it could be done (and now my brother does the same thing every chance he gets).

During the first year of my dad’s life, two notable ships sailed for the first time. RMS Titanic. No elaboration needed on that one. USS Texas (BB-35). The Texas is still afloat, permanently anchored in Buffalo Bayou and the Houston Ship Channel near Houston, Texas. The Battleship Texas was the first battleship memorial in the U.S.

Fenway Park and Tiger Stadium both opened in 1912, and have lived large in the history of American baseball.

Women did not yet have the right to vote, but the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. was founded that year, and American Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel.

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in November, 1912, after Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican party by founding a party of his own — the Bull Moose party — when he was not nominated over the incumbent, William Howard Taft.

And since science is my main thing, I have to mention Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911, and Alfred Wegener’s proposal of a fully formulated theory of continental drift in 1912. No one bought it then, but he’d be having the last laugh today.

History. We all live through some of it, without even knowing whether the things that seem huge to us will be remembered at all (even by us) when we’re older, or after we’re gone. My dad served in the Army during WWII, and landed on the Philippine island of Leyte on the day the Japanese decided to try and take it back. He told a story to me and my brother about how the Japanese fighter aircraft started shooting up the beach just as he and his unit finished off-loading from their landing craft, and how he dove beneath a pile of duffle bags for cover. When he crawled back out he saw a crater where he had been standing, where one of the  Japanese shells had hit. My brother and I just looked at each other with our mouths hanging open. This was during his final year of life, and we had never heard that story before. My brother just happened to be watching a show about WWII on the History Channel, and, of course, my dad would watch almost anything on TV. It was just kind of an “oh, yeah, I remember when that happened” sort of story, but I imagine the memory was terrifying enough for all those years that he didn’t want to relive it by telling it.

You just never know.

My dad and his Army tent

I was cursed (or blessed, depending on who you asked, or the prevailing style) with naturally curly hair. Unruly stuff. Silky, fine-textured and unwilling to conform to any alternate configurations – I suspect unless I applied some really strong chemicals, which I never did. As it grew it expanded out from my head at the same time it encroached more and more into my face and eyes, and would still do so today if I let it. (Most of it grows forward from the back of my head.) But I struggled with it, since long hair was in then. My hair was the stone around my neck. I figured everyone (especially those blessed with long, smooth, shiny tresses) had to hate me. Like it was contagious, or something? What was I thinking?

I was a teenager. Obviously, my brain was malfunctioning, as teenage brains are wont. I stumbled through my high school years avoiding interactions with all but a few of my classmates, positive of their censure. Dummy. I’m so glad I’m several decades older and wiser now. If I felt like a leper for having curly hair, what horrors might the “cool kids” be dreaming up to make themselves feel inadequate? Duh. Although I’m sure there were those among them who were completely confident of their coolness, I’d bet there weren’t as many as I’m sure I thought at the time.

Now, thanks to the internet, and FaceBook, I know a lot of my classmates a lot better than I ever would have imagined. And they’re a cool bunch. But now I know I’m cool, too. Who’d've thought that? I have written about this before , and it just so happens that some of us are getting together again this weekend for a pre-Christmas party and maybe a little reunion planning. And maybe some of us will swap “I was a teenage leper” stories. It could happen.

Now I prefer to copy the hair-style of my dog

Someone's precious pup

My version of the basic “brown paper exercise.” Still a work in progress.

But I’m not posting a photo of the finished product until after it’s in the hands of it’s new owner. That only seems fair. Instead I offer a first look at a new project, which is a *secret, Christmas present* project, that I may not be able to show further progress on until after it, too, has gone to its new home.

Just a bunch of lines at the moment