Blue Highways

            Blue Highways is a book by William Least Heat-Moon that I read about 40 years ago. The book, as I recall, describes how, denied tenure at a university, the author decides to drive around the country going only on the highways on his map colored blue, which excluded all the Interstate Highways. His companion was his dog.

 

            Kim and I decided to travel back and forth to Atlanta using only blue highways. We didn’t use a paper map, so there was nothing blue. Instead, we told our GPS (we named her Gertrude) to stay off of expressways. Gertrude agreed, though I did detect some reluctance in her tone of voice.

 

            So, a couple of weeks ago, when we drove down to Atlanta to stay a few days, see family, close the sale of our condo, and pack stuff for the movers and our own reliable car, we traveled using blue highways. By staying off expressways for the 1,000-mile drive (each way), we avoided trucks, excessive speeds, and a hypnotic sameness of the view. We traded that for an exploration of our country: the farms, the small towns and restaurants (not always great), the old barns, and the hills and the clouds.

 

            Kim spent much of the trip with her camera pressed against the window, taking pictures of, mainly, the fields and clouds. Many of the photos did not turn out well enough, due to the motion of the car, the bugs on the tinted windshield, and the hand-speed necessary to get the camera aimed and focused as we drove through a scene.

 

            But this doesn’t really matter. Kim was seeing and appreciating, whether her camera caught what she saw or not. This is her artist’s eye, and it informs her love of the world. I, on the other hand, suffer from a condition that I named “male pattern blindness.” I miss stuff, unless it’s pointed out to me. This happens around the house, a lot, but also in the garden and in the car, where at least I have an excuse that I’m driving. Kim’s capacity for appreciation is amazing, especially considering her potentially distracting health issues. She was also collecting pictures for future landscape paintings - studying the colors of clouds and fields.

 

            Here are a few of Kim's photos from our trip, in no particular order:

 

We missed most of the rain.

One of the bigger small towns we passed through. Note blue highway signs.

Clouds were always with us.

Kentucky has black barns.

We saw a lot of barns in need of repair.

newer version

Twisting roads in Kentucky

Looks like a . . . ?

Chattanooga speaks.

Amazing what is required to put a road through the mountains.

Bumper Crop

We saw a lot of productive farms.

Exciting Sky

Another Blue Highway Town

Somehow this did not rain on us.

Functioning, but needs paint

Blue Highway

Taller

            This really happened.

 

            After a morning of yardwork and housework and then Kim’s arduous dental appointment, we settled onto our couches in front of the television for an afternoon nap. After about an hour I tired of the movie and couldn’t sleep, so I moved across the room to my desk. Kim was dozing lightly.

 

            She awakened, stood, and then said in a startled voice, “David! Look at this! Look at me! I feel like Alice in Wonderland!” I did as I was told. She was significantly taller than the Kim I have known for years. 

 

            “Everything looks different – the table, the couch, the floor! I’m seeing them at a different angle! Come here!” I did so, and we gave each other a hug – something we’ve done at least a thousand times. This one was different. She was taller.

 

            We went upstairs to measure her height. She assured me that she was 5’ 7” in her younger days, but in the last few years, thanks to gravity and her spinal issues with degenerative disc disease, she now regularly measured 5’ 4”. Most mornings she would hang by her fingertips from a door frame, and that might stretch her an inch – for a while. But now she was 5’ 7”.

 

            We were puzzled. What caused it? Was there something in the drugs that numbed her jaw at the dentist’s? No, this was not some drug-addled delusion, as I saw the difference from across the room and tested it with a hug and then a tape measure. Was it the mushrooms? No, because we were due to have mushroom ravioli for dinner, but that was several hours from now. Or maybe it was the result of several hours in the dentist’s chair, tipped way back because the dentist is not very tall. Maybe.

 

            What was most refreshing wasn’t the added inches, but rather the fact that the world can offer us such surprises, and the more unexplained, the better. I feel a similar delight on the rare occasions that I stumble into something from quantum physics, something that violates what is sometimes called “common sense.” (For a taste of what I mean, try the movie What the Bleep Do We know. Cool stuff, and don’t worry how true it is, or whether the concept of “true” really applies.)

 

            Within an hour Kim was back to 5’ 4”. A hug confirmed it.

Adventures in Housing

            As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we put our Atlanta condo on the market and moved back to our Bark House, waiting for us unsold in Northern Michigan. Several of my readers advised that this was a good decision, and we should just relax without all the stress of house shopping.

 

            So, we told Kelly, our realtor, to take our house off the market. She didn’t do it, probably at the suggestion of her boss, and we’ve had three couples looking in the last two weeks, all with our permission. We did this because, coming home, we immediately encountered a mountain of yard work – leaves, weeds, gravel that the snowplow had scraped into the garden – and we felt (in our backs and knees) that we could not handle the work here, and we have been unsuccessful in finding help (except for one guy who charges $150 per hour).

 

            It also occurred to us that it would be nice to have a modest condo in Traverse City, a place where we could spend our winters in non-isolation, and where we would live full-time when the Bark House was too much. We found one in the old mental institution where we lived while building the Bark House, and we made an offer, but we backed out after the contractor’s inspection revealed some serious problems. We are still waiting (two weeks now) for our earnest money to be returned.

 

            Meanwhile, we continue to look for a condo in or near Traverse City. What if someone actually wanted to buy our Bark House? Where would we go? Could we ask the buyers to wait? Every day we go back and forth about staying here full time or selling and moving to a condo. This is feeding the stress that my readers mentioned.

 

            Adding to the stress: Our Atlanta loft is under contract, and in a few days we will drive to Atlanta (1,000 miles) to pack, meet the movers, and close the deal – we hope. Then drive home. Might not be a blog entry next week . . ..

 

            So, pending:

·      closing sale of the Atlanta place – possible delay for lender appraisal

·      earnest money from Traverse City condo – it’s been two weeks Got it.

·      sale of Bark House – one couple “somewhat interested,” but on African safari now

·      finding help with Bark House – guy came over, but more of a carpenter.

·      finding senior-friendly housing, probably a condo, purchased if/when Atlanta place sells. Looked at one Monday afternoon - Nope

 

Time for a cocktail . . ..

On Being Told I Look Young

 On Being Told I Look Young

I am aging from the inside

out, I replied. Look in and

you will see my heart sifting

dust like an hour glass, dust

swirling like scraps in windy

corners, large organs drying like

buffalo chips, my stomach an

ashy fireplace, the healthy pink

we loved turned gray, as in

the nightmare where the door

of the microwave oven was left

open and some Betty Furness had

her insides cooked (well done) on

camera. At times debris works

its way to the surface—a 

bit in my scalp or navel,

some grit in the cracks in

my forehead, some unexplained

dirt under my nails, and

a dry musty smell

of long unopened books.

 

The thing is: I wrote this poem when I was in my 20s. Now, in my 80s (early 80s), it’s not so amusing. Prophetic, perhaps.

 

            While on the subject of my internal plumbing, here’s another poem I wrote years ago:

 

Twist

 

The doctor studies the slope

of my electrocardiogram

and announces that my heart

twists unusually in my chest.

He can’t tell if this odd

axis is a recent shift,

or whether a twisted heart –

its electricity turned to strange

vectors, impulses staggering

out through my skin askew

—has always been with me.

After being told I’ll die

from something else, not that,

I accept this heart:

                                    Doc

Williams in Paterson said

to let our words visit love

by falling to it aslant.

I’m happy to know I’m equipped

for romance. Another doc said

that when repairing vasectomies he

splices the tubes with oblique

surfaces joined to increase

the size of the passage for sperm.

 

 

Thelma and Louise

 

            Kim had one of those gift days on Saturday, with enough rain to keep us indoors pretty much all day, away from the weeding and yardwork that typically take up 2+ hours daily. We accomplished one of our (her) indoor cleaning goals (laundry room floor, especially behind the washer and dryer), and for most of the afternoon she was on a chair aiming her 500mm lens at the hummingbird feeder we had set up outside the window. She was still able to fix spaghetti for dinner, to which I contributed an inedible salad.

 

            Last week we had seen the male hummingbird arrive, a few days before the females, as usual. But then she spotted one female, then another, and they were with us all day. Kim named them Thelma and Louise – though we hope they have a happier ending than the movie characters. Kim can tell the difference between these two identical birds. We named the male Brad Pitt – thanks to Beth for the suggestion.

 

            At this point I am supposed to include some of the amazing photos she took, but unfortunately, something went wrong with her Adobe Lightroom software when I attempted a minor adjustment, and two phone calls to Adobe tech support each made the problem worse.

 

            But for me, more than the photographs was seeing and hearing Kim so thrilled and content. She has been dealing, rather heroically, with a lot of pain and fatigue as she takes care of her gardens, our home, and me. But here she was doing her own thing, and it continued into the evening when she encouraged me to watch a movie on my own while she downloaded her pictures into the inappropriate files on her computer. She had, I think, over 700 hummingbird photos, and she had a big and joyful job deleting the less beautiful ones. (She has since then, working around the problematic software, made some painful discards, taking the number down to 100.)

 

            But wait! Kim figured a work-around solution to the Lightroom problem as we wait to see if our friend Miguel can walk us through a real solution. So here are a few of her photos:

 

 

Louise - or is it Thelma - catching raindrops

Sometimes we are so caught up in the ruby throat of the males that we overlook the amazing beauty of feathers on the back.

The hummingbirds frequented a stick that Kim placed in camera range near the feeders.

Hard to photograph a hummingbird in flight, but Kim did it.

Note the partially open beak. I believe this is called distal rhynchokinesis.

stretch

Brad Pitt (I almost typed "Bird Pitt.")

Thus the name: Ruby-throated Hummingbird

 

            The company of Thelma and Louise was one of a series of encounters with the beauty that abounds at the Bark House. We had an afternoon of amazing clouds over the lake, and their reflections, which we enjoyed with cameras and a glass of Port. We had an evening with heat lightning flashing in the skies. We had flowers and a color Kim named “new leaf green.” Much of this Kim photographed, and I hope to be sharing the best of them in a blog post once we get our photography software straightened out. Meanwhile, we are enjoying an alternative to what we see and read in the news every day.

 

            Thank you, Thelma and Louise. And Brad.

            

Friends

Today's post is a rewrite of a piece I posted nine years ago.

 

            I don’t see much cause to be thankful for Facebook, where it is estimated that many will spend two years of their lives doing whatever. But I am grateful that Facebook turned “friend” from a noun into a verb. You don’t just have a friend – it’s something you do. And I don’t mean that you click something on your “device” to create or announce a new relationship. To friend somebody is not quite the same as to “befriend” them, which one dictionary defines: “to act as a friend to someone by offering help or support.” To friend someone involves more dimensions than help or support, and does not simply involve an offer, a gesture, however sincere.

 

            As psychologist Rob Pasick noted in his book about men, Awakening from the Deep Sleep, most of us typically don’t have friends – we have contacts. I believe he is right, as far as any generalization can be right, about men who are younger than I am. When you are trying to build a career, a life stage that my friend Peter summarizes as being “on the make,” contacts are important. And, to our loss, they sometimes take the place of friendships. This was never really true about me during my teaching career because with tenure, my career curve pretty much stagnated – I was not on the make and thus didn’t need any contacts. No, my reason for not having many friends was different.

 

            Once I retired, I continued not to have many friends. I hung out with Kim and Kim’s friends. She is much better at friendships than I am. She phones people, sends them cards, gets together for breakfast or lunch. Not me. I have acquaintances who I am always glad to see and talk with, but I never made the follow-up “let’s get together” phone call, despite Kim’s prodding. I do not take action to friend my friends. (A collateral benefit: I have few enemies, either – none I know about.) My basic model of a friendship occurred when I was working at Starbucks and I’d engage in a few minutes of conversation with customers who were invariably incurious about me. We would “connect,” usually, and then they would disappear.

 

            My new friend, Don, told me that the average male has 1.67 friends. That seems maybe a little low, even for me, but close. To friend somebody is a lot like loving them, in the sense of attachment and commitment. But love, for me at this point, gets into deep sexual water that I’ll save for a future post. Suffice it to say that I love Kim and she is my best friend, and these are two somewhat different things.

 

            So, you are probably not asking, what is my problem? The problem is that I don’t see it as a problem, because I see real friendships as deep and enduring, despite time and space. And unlike those who feel good about having a lot of Facebook friends (aka faux friends), I feel good about my relationships with the few friends I have, even though they may disappear for years, or be miles away. I think of Peter, an Amherst friend who flew out to see me and with whom I instantly resumed a friendship with the warmth, openness and depth that I remember from college and our few meetings since then. Or Jim, a colleague, who with his wife Angie we see once or twice a year, but who keeps in touch by responding to my blog.

 

            Distance may not be a problem for friendships. In fact, it may enhance them. Most of my current friends (except for you, Alice, and, Jerry and Fleda, and more recently, Don,) don’t live close. I sustain these friendships by writing this blog, and by occasionally hearing back. I work better with pen pals because I find that I can open myself better in writing than I can in person. The David in my writing is a filtered or created version of me, a persona. I learned this when I wrote my book about my recently murdered schizophrenic brother, and I, the narrator of the book, became a better brother to him once he was dead than I was when he was alive.

 

            My act of friending, then, is pretty much an act of writing. Sorry about that. And the deep, warm and open friendships I imagine may be just that – imagined. Works for me, though.

 

I remember reading some of my love poems to a class of students. One of them asked how my wife liked my being so open with my feelings. I said that I’m not really very open, and when she asks me how I feel about something, I usually say that I will get back to her on that in a few days. Or it’s like the old truism that when you ask a guy how he feels and he says, “Fine,” what he means is, “I don’t understand the question.”

 

 

Not One of My Gifts

            Some people have a brain that’s good at seeing how things work. Physical things. They can look at a machine, or a household mechanical problem, and figure out how to fix it, often without having to consult an instruction manual. I think Kim’s whole family shares the genes that make such simple miracles happen. This ability is not one of my gifts.

 

            Let me share a few examples.

 

            I bought a leaf-mulching machine. Plug it in and a plastic string whirls around, chopping up the leaves you dump in the top, and out comes the leaf mulch at the bottom, ready for the garden. Easy. It came in a box that included 4 metal legs, a frame where the legs attach, another piece containing the motor and strings plus an on/off switch and a socket for the plug, and a wide funnel on the top where you feed the leaves. Easy. Except I could not get the damn thing together. The legs went on simply: 4 legs, 4 slots to stick them in. But the piece with the motor would not fit on top of the leg assembly! And the funnel would not fit on top of that! As I studied the problem, I was further annoyed at the idiots who had manufactured this machine and then I saw that all of the writing on the outside of the housing was written upside down! How could I trust these incompetents?! It then occurred to me, in a flash of insight, that I had the troublesome middle piece upside down. I turned it over, and everything fit together. I was a little nervous plugging it in, but it hummed enthusiastically. Problem solved.

 

            An earlier story of my success occurred several years ago when I was visiting my younger brother, John, who was living in a small apartment in Phoenix. As he walked me around the place, he complained that one of his kitchen plugs was broken, so he could not use his toaster. I looked at the cover and noticed it had a little button toward the middle. I pushed the button and it clicked. “Try it now,” I told him. He did. It worked. John was amazed. He said it had been broken for weeks, and he thought I was a genius. I don’t know where I had learned about the Ground Fault Interrupter (GFI). Probably one had saved me from electrocuting myself while plugging in a wet toothbrush and I heard the button click. Whatever – I felt like a hot shit.

 

            But the best of my mechanical achievements occurred a few months ago when I successfully assembled an Inversion Table that I bought on Amazon. Lying on it is supposed to be good for the back, stretching out the vertebrae that gravity has been compacting for decades.  It (the table, not my spine) had hundreds of parts, including bolts and screws of various sizes. This, I thought, will require consultation with the instruction manual. I began the process laying everything out on the floor of our basement. Quite a display!

 

            About eight hours later, I was finished. I tried it, carefully climbing on and tilting it back beyond level, and it worked! By that I don’t mean that it helped my spinal health. No, I simply mean that it did not collapse with a loud metallic crash, injuring and humiliating me. I called Kim down to witness my triumph. She gave me a hug and told me that I can do just about anything, and that I should have more confidence in myself.

 

            Well, perhaps. But what I did was write an email to the company that made the inversion table, complimenting them on the quality of the instruction manual, explaining that I’m usually not good at this assembly stuff, but I sailed (slowly) through a complex process. Please, I said, pass my compliments and my thanks up or over to those responsible for writing those instructions. I realize now that my note says more about me than it does about the quality of the instructions. I have told more than one repairman, “I can’t fix many things, but I can fix your paragraph.” I tried to make my experience about writing.

 

            We sold the inversion table in a garage sale when we thought we were going to sell our house and would certainly not have room for it in a condo (that we did not buy). And besides, Kim’s back was too sore for her to ever use the device, so up the basement stairs and out the door to a lucky buyer. He does not know how fortunate he is that he did not have to assemble the thing. My eight hours of work saved him maybe two hours.

 

Please note that I have not written about dealing with computers. I am, laughably, tech support in our home . . ..

 

This just in:

 

Successfully fixed Kim’s camera lens when I noticed two tiny loose screws, and I found a tiny screw driver.