The Late-Bloomers' Prom

May 28, 1994

"Life's a dance, you learn as you go.  Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow.  Don't worry 'bout what you don't know.  Life's a dance you learn as you go."  Which Nashville philosopher/poet penned those lines, perhaps over watery coffee at the Waffle House, I don't know.  (I guess I could look it up.)

It's prom season around here.  My friends who are more "normal" than I am on the timeline of life have been posting their kids' prom pictures: the hunt for just the right dress, the shy smiles and fumbling with corsages, the beauty-pageant line-ups of pastels, brights, black, and sparkles, the guys with all their variations on tuxes, from ultra-cool casual to sweetly stiff and formal. My favorite shots are the laughing shots--the ones where somebody kicks up a gown to reveal Toms or sneakers, the bunny-ears, the tongues sticking out.  Those are the kids, who, I suspect, have caught the idea that this is a DANCE, a celebration.

Although I survived the junior-high rite of passage in my hometown, Phil Jones Dancing School, along with the rest of the 7th and 8th graders, to be ready for those formal high school dances, maybe a cotillion or two, and The Prom, I never actually went to anything other than the totally informal, flail-and-jump-around-in-jeans affairs in the school gym or the church youth room.  I was, for some reason, not a girl to be asked to the bigger dances.  Maybe the fact that I was 5'10" by seventh grade had something to do with it.  Or maybe it was my less-than-perfect figure, my acne, my general awkwardness... whatever.

Or maybe it was just one more gift of being a late-bloomer.

Instead, my "prom", my celebration, if you will, began well after those years, in my 20's, when I found myself free to discover how much fun it was to "dance like nobody's watching."  Most of the time, I was right.  Nobody was watching.

Much to my kids' amusement now, I guess somebody, somebody with a camera , was watching from time to time. This was an evidently hilarious two-step with a good-natured friend at the Broken Spoke  in Austin, TX 

Do you remember that moment in "The Sound of Music" when Fraulein Maria  is dancing an Austrian folk-dance with the Captain?  They look at each other through the "window" of their arms and something happens...the camera focus turns all blurry,  cue the violins.   My first serious boyfriend and I (yes, I was 22--a late-bloomer, remember?) had our own Maria/Captain moment in a community folk-dance class, learning that very same dance.  We weren't yet a couple at that class, but shortly after our "looking through the window" moment, he got over his "bachelor-to-the-rapture" shyness and asked me to be his date for "The Great Waltz" -- a quirky tradition at UT Austin: an evening of Strauss waltzes and polkas, played by a live orchestra. Fortunately, someone had a camera that night.  That emerald-green taffeta gown with the huge, full skirt and crinoline was a look that just had to be preserved for posterity, along with the pile of big hair sprigged with baby's breath, and the wrist corsage.  (What?  It was the 80's...in Texas, for goodness sake.) 

Can't you just feel the sparks between these two ?

No, the romance didn't last, but the memory of that elegant dancing evening did.  Some pretty fun things happen when you're dancing.

 And then there's this sequence, taken by one of my fellow ESL teachers, as students from Iran, Paraguay, and Japan insisted that we line-dance, in our soaking wet clothes, fresh from a water-fight in the river, while waiting for our barbecue at the school picnic.  The woven-straw crown really completes the ripped jeans and soggy tee-shirt look, doesn't it? (Chicken/egg question here:  is it my fashion sense that contributed to my social retardation, or is it the other way 'round?  )

"Start on your right foot..."

Once we got going with the dance that afternoon, even as the rain started pouring down, a bunch of people joined us.  That happens a lot.  You surrender to the music and let yourself be moved along, not caring who's watching, and suddenly, you're not alone. And that seems to be my experience with dancing through life.

I danced my way through my 20's and at the end of that decade I married a brilliant, cute guy I met in a country-western dance bar, a mathematician/physicist/astronomer whose pick-up line was "Can you dance?"  (Notice that it was not "will you dance?"  My now-husband, Andre, was giving me an instant peek into his precision-oriented personality.) Our first dance as husband and wife, not quite a year later, was a fast two-step with all kinds of twirls and fancy footwork: a fitting start to our adventure as husband and wife, an adventure that marks its 18th year next Monday. 


Have you ever noticed that when you put on music and move (running with your iPod, cleaning the kitchen with the radio on, or those hilarious Zumba classes), you just don't get tired until you're completely, utterly spent?  And even then, you can somehow keep moving, right?  As I train for my 13.1 mile run  across the city of San Francisco this July, I'm compiling my playlists for the iPod, and it's a strange mix: U2, Shakira, Christina Aguilera, and The Chieftains, Twang-Twang-Shocka-Boom and Beyonce, Paul Simon, the choir of ChristChurch Nashville, Black-Eyed Peas and a rock version of "Scotland the Brave".  Oh, and there's 2 versions of the Cotton-Eyed Joe, a jig titled "The Wind that Shakes the Barley",  along with Gloria Estefan's "Conga".  Perhaps I should warn anybody who might come to watch me run the race this summer, if you happen to catch me when Asleep at the Wheel starts up "Boogie Back to Texas", you just might find yourself pulled into the 98-step combination that makes up the Sweetheart Schottische.  

"Don't worry about what you don't know.  Life's a dance you learn as you go." 

 Don't stop until you're completely, utterly spent...

Aging backwards, or what if I'm already so nutty that it's impossible to tell when senility begins to set in?

In my previous post, "Dare, Double Dare", I told you a story about about a girl who hated PE class enough to tell her PE coach that she refused to run the 600 yard "Presidential Fitness Test".  It was among my examples of my stubbornly daring nature.  But now I'm wondering if risking a scolding for not running is really all that daring.  Well, Coach Masiuk, wherever you are, I hope you will read this and have a really good laugh.  Not only do I LIKE running now, I'm actually training to run my first-ever half-marathon.  For those of you who are NOT  PE class superstars, that's 13.1 MILES, which is (getting out my calculator ) 23,056 yards.  Um. I wonder if that's cosmic penance for balking at the 600 yards at the age of 10, with some kind of cosmic interest added, given that I'm 47 now... oh, crap... too much math, another subject that used to inspire fear and loathing, and now inspires a kind of awe and fascination. 

To support my craziness, and to honor my life-changing, lifelong friend, Brett, make a donation to the American Brain Tumor Association Team Breakthrough at my ABTA fundraising website

Which brings me to my question:  as we age, is it normal to start knocking at the doors I slammed in youth and to keep finding that what's behind them is actually pretty cool?  What about this "older and wiser" stuff?  I think I'm going backwards, and I'm loving it.   I'm getting older and more of a sky-blue, wide-eyed optimist than I've ever been. It doesn't mean that I'm suddenly one of those super-achievers who gets it all "right".  Just ask any recipient of one of my "artistic" quilts (that means it has goofs in it) , or my  East-Coast friends and relatives who got some of my beginner-knitter neck-warmers with all kinds of "design elements" (that's code for goofs) for Christmas.   I am unlikely to be one of the first to cross the finish line in the San Francisco Half Marathon (2nd half), but I WILL finish.  ( Somebody might have to bring along a Hefty Lawn and Leaf bag and a gurney to haul my dilapidated carcass onto the BART and back home, but I WILL finish.  ) 

If you read "Dare, Double Dare", then you know that I challenged myself to enter a contest to sing the National Anthem at the baseball stadium where the San Francisco Giants play.  Um... I came in 5th.  OK, so that's not first, but it's in the top 10.  And that essay contest for Real Simple Magazine?  Well, let's just say that I am free to submit my essay elsewhere.   But I wrote it.  I gleefully poured my heart into it.  I shared it with some friends.  I did it, freely, with love and optimism.   And I might be way off here, but I'm beginning to think that I might be onto something: if I'm free to fail without being devastated, and if I'm throwing myself into projects ("dares") that I love, then any achievement that gets measured along the way is just, well, wonderful, but it's not the pre-requisite for feeling like a winner.   I'm a winner when I keep living, learning, failing, and trying again, chuckling at myself.   

I read "The Once and Future King" a long time ago, and have watched the movie,"Camelot" more times than I should admit.  The line that sticks with me is what Merlin said to young Wot (later called King Arthur)  "The best thing for being sad is to learn something".   Merlin had it right.  The best thing for being sad is to learn something.  And middle-age brings PLENTY to be sad about... um, gravity, can we talk?  Or those moments when we have to acknowledge that our kids really aren't going to be Rhodes Scholars or Olympic medalists or Van Cliburn Competition winners... (and if yours are, well... why are you reading my blog? You've got places to be right now.)   Relationships that change and maybe end, physical decline...And then there's the basic fact that my journey on earth is probably about half-done.  Yikes.  That's a lot to be sad about.  And if I take my eyes off my own tiny life and look around, there's so much greed, injustice (even within my beloved church), abuse,exploitation... Let's not go there today.  

So, I guess, for me, that means I'd better keep going with the learning-something path.  In the past couple of weeks, I've been sidelined from running by a small stress fracture (check the boxes marked "gravity", "physical decline") in my heel.  I'm wearing a "boot" for about 4 more weeks, but I need to keep training for my half-marathon.  

So that has booted me into the brand-new (for me) world of cross-training--another great adventure in "who knew this was so cool!?"  I'm water-running  (put down your coffee before you watch how funny this looks)

And I'm bike-riding.  No, seriously.  I have pedaled 49 miles this week, and I just bought myself a bike that actually fits my big-ol long legs.  And I am learning, learning, learning things: like "bike shorts with padding that protects one's hoo-hah is truly a necessity and not a luxury" and "don't try to shift gears on the steepest part of the hill".  I've discovered that my part of the East Bay is just riddled with paved bike paths that connect me to all kinds of destinations.  (If it weren't for the rain predicted for this afternoon, I'd be riding my bike to my dentist appointment. )

Oh,and I'm studying barefoot running, as explained in Christopher McDougall's  book, Born to Run .  I've even joined the "100 Up Challenge" to see if I can overhaul my faulty running technique by marching slowly in place, in my bare feet.   Sorry, no snarf-inducing video on that one yet, but stay tuned. (That's either a promise or a threat,depending on how you feel about watching a well-upholstered middle-aged woman march in place.)

Meanwhile, I'm just about $1200 short of my fundraising goal for my run.  I want to raise $3500 for the American Brain Tumor Association, to fund brain-tumor-fighting research and treatment, in honor of my very dear friend (living beautifully and courageously with brain cancer), the friend who helped me kick-off my middle-aged renaissance in 2009 by helping me re-learn to sing.

I was sad.  My friend taught me something new.   It worked!

Who knew?!

Dare, double dare !

As the chocolate-colored surface of the shallow puddle zoomed up at me, my last thought was... well, I don't know if I had a thought, actually.  Maybe, "oops!"

And then everything went brown.  And cold.  And wet.  Shrieking laughter hit my ears once I surfaced again, on my knees, in my now mud-soaked, home-made blue-gingham dress with the peter pan collar and the puffed sleeves. Or maybe it was the red-flowered one, or the brown one; my mom believed in making good use of simple sewing patterns for her already oversized, and growing 6 year old.  Laura, Heidi, and Jennifer had all succeeded in jumping OVER the puddle on the school playground, just before the line-up bell rang.  Me, not so much.  I had to wait in the principal's office for my mom to bring me dry clothes.

Lesson one in dare-taking: calculate the downside, evaluate your chances, and keep some dry clothes handy.

Except for the puddle incident, I've lived a pretty cautious life...

Well, except for telling the 6th grade gym teacher that I had no intention of running 600 yards, even though he jogged around the field, yelling at me, as I walked the stupid presidential fitness test, while the rest of my class watched from the window of room 306...

Oh, and  that bit with climbing out my homeroom window and putting a cardboard elephant on the roof outside my 9th grade French class...

Yup. Cautious, circumspect, safe.

Unless you count stuffing my 10th grade, size-16 body into a shiny lycra leotard and singing "At the Ballet"  from A Chorus Line with Laura (the successful mud-puddle jumper from years back) on the high school stage in front of an audience.

And then there was asking Doug Smith to the Senior Prom.
In the library.
In front of several of his friends.  In front of a couple of my friends.
He said he had a wrestling match the next day and couldn't go.  Oh well.

And yet, I'm not one of those creatures whose life is limited to caring for three-dozen cats, painting my fingernails lavender and counting the days between therapy appointments and support group.  I've managed to succeed a few times and I've got myself a pretty wonderful life with a husband, a family, friends, music, and the occasional athletic endeavor. ( I've ditched the puffed-sleeve/peter pan collar look, and I stay away from jumping over puddles where anybody might see me, though.  And lycra is limited to garments that aren't usually seen in public. )

But in the last two years, I've been getting some reminders that life is short.  Too short.  And that puddle-jumping,  gym-coach-defying, elephant-on-the-roof-placing, leotard-wearing, prom-asking part of me has started to ask, "So, what's the real downside?  What's the worst that can happen if I fail?  Why the heck not try?"

So, I'm back to taking personal risks: not the "end up in the hospital or the morgue if you fail" kind of risks, but the kind that take me out of my safe zone and into joy.  I've always loved to sing, and I'm blessed to have a church family who invite me to sing often.  I have a dear, dear friend who's helped me to reclaim my middle-aged singing voice and my confidence.  That eventually led me to ASK (nervy, huh?)  a conductor friend of mine if he would give me the privilege of singing the soprano solo in the Brahms Requiem, with orchestra.  He gave me that honor, and it was a life-changing experience.  I'm not headed for the stage of the Met, but at least I didn't have to wipe mud off my puffed-sleeves afterward.  And it was pure joy for me.  Life is short.  Take joy where you can find it. (  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_7YzjqZ-OM   is the link, in case you're curious how it turned out. )

I've also always loved to write.  I've been a letter-writer since I was 12, and an email letter-writer for many years.  In recent years, I've taken a few risks with writing devotionals for my church choir, and this blog.  I've even managed to find a little part-time job that allows me to edit and teach, and occasionally write, and get paid for it.

A couple of weeks ago, I submitted my first-ever article to a major magazine's annual essay contest.  The winner gets $3,000, a trip to New York, lunch with some of the editors of the magazine, and publication of the winning essay.  Over 7,000 people entered last year.  It feels right now like I'm mid-air over the puddle again, except that, if my essay is not the winner, I'm going to submit it to several other magazines, and then some more, until it gets published somewhere and I get paid for it.  No mud, no lycra, no snickering in the library for me.

Today, the voting webpage went up for a radio-station's "Star-Spangled Sing-Off", an audition for a chance to sing the National Anthem before an audience gathered to hear an opera at AT&T Park in San Francisco.  Among the contestants that include a number of gorgeous young things who can sing, a couple of choral groups, some singing puppets, a guy on stilts in an Uncle Sam costume, and a guy who made his audition video in the mens' room with the urinal flusher in the background, you will find me, about fourth row down, Valerie Hedrick.  Yup.  I'm "out there" too.  If you like, you can vote for me.  (How's that for nervy?  I can just hear that 6th grade gym coach saying "girls like you are headed for trouble")  Here's the link, in case you're so inclined. http://www.kdfc.com/pages/10532442.php 

So, this summer, when the mirror tells me that I'm not getting any younger, and the life-threatening diagnoses of some dear friends tell me that life is both precious and short, I'm continuing to walk the line between safe and silly.
And in the process, I'm not scraping mud off my peter-pan collar.  I'm laughing, and looking for the next joy-risking challenge.  Care to join me?  I dare you!

Best Practices?

"I live on Jupiter," the four-year-old announces.

"Oh really?", the enlightened mother asks, "And what do you do there?"
(Child Development 101 -- modelling the "ask open-ended questions" dictum)

"I do farting contests all day long."

At this point, the 13-year-old picks up the thread.
"You know, Mom, scientists have determined that the atmosphere on Jupiter is one continuous thunderstorm, so I guess if you lived there, you'd need indoor games."

The Experts tell us that good parents engage their young children in conversation at their level, whenever possible.  I wonder if this is what they had in mind.

Sometimes, the milepost is capable of moving

... but tonight, it wasn't, at least not all that much.  However, the guy standing on the ridgetop, watching it from a safe distance, wasn't convinced.

Now that I'm no longer driving across the country with four kids in a rented minivan, I'm finding that I can still write about The Journey, rather than just my cross-country roadtrip.  And tonight, I passed a rather interesting little milestone that seemed to merit some musing.

Those of you who know me off-line, or even in my Facebook life, know that I am a walker.  I walk for exercise (and now that Dennys/McDonalds/Brown's IceCream/, etc... have added a few vacation pounds, I sure do need to keep that up), and I walk for sanity.  Walking is my "me" time: my music-learning time, my phone-conversation time, my thinking time, my worrying about sick friends time, my praying time.  And I walk the same territory most of the time: a park in my neighborhood that includes a lot of what California calls "Open Space" (yes, it's capitalized)--protected, undeveloped wildlife habitat with walking/biking trails flanked by firebreaks in the shoulder-high grasses.  As I walk, the vistas take my eyes to the twin peaks of Mount Diablo, the Acalanes Ridge that makes a gently serrated sunset each evening as the sun sinks into the bay behind the ridge, and to the treeless, tawny grasses of the Kirker Pass, hills whose curves resemble a sleeping nude when the light fades.

Because I have walked every foot of the park, both morning and evening, many, many times, there is a "not here" quality to my walks.  I don't have to think about where to go, what comes next.  I just walk, and as I walk, my mind goes wherever it wants to, often re-visiting previous conversations, mulling over something I've read, planning something I might want to sew, knit, cook, or quilt, even "writing" in my head, playing with the sounds of words and phrases that might make music on the page. So, although I notice things like the perfume of the Southern Magnolias along the trail past the bocce courts, and the funny way that dog-owners move in packs like their dogs in the public dog-park, by the time I'm panting up the hill to the oval of Live Oaks that frame the memorial to Vietnam vets, I'm "gone"--I'm wandering the terrain of my spirit; either wrestling or rejoicing, and I'm occasionally surprised by the creatures who are also out wandering the open space, probably much more focused on the here-and-now than I am.  I've gasped at red-tail and Cooper's hawks who watch me from a tree or fence until I'm close enough to see their eyes blink, and I've met up with coyotes at mid-day and twilight.  There are the ever-optimistic ground squirrels who stand erect beside their hillside burrows, seeming to dare the hawks to come down and try to catch them.

And then there are the snakes.

Ughhhhhhhh.

 I LOATHE snakes.  I'm not much of a reptile fan, but snakes, in particular, make me want to scream and run.  I've shared with my Facebook friends reports of feeling "trapped" on the hill by tiny, baby rattlesnakes, and utterly harmless, but big and intimidating California King Snakes.  For me, particularly in Spring and Summer, every stick on the trail is a rattlesnake, waiting to make this walk my last, and on particularly hot evenings, I have been known to carry a pointed-end hiking stick.  But a while ago, I learned that there is a much more common snake, a harmless impostor called a "Gopher Snake", that is very common in our area, and is often mistaken for a rattler.

Tonight, as I watched a fellow walker, on the trail ahead of me, standing motionless about 4 feet from a large, lumpy beige-and-black spotted snake stretched most of the way across the trail, I did NOT, for once, scream, freak-out, run, or turn around and go back to the oak grove.  Maybe it's like the progressive desensitization that parents go through:  when your first-born stumbles and scrapes a knee, you gasp, take a deep breath, try to remember your first aid training, dig out the first-aid kit that you carry everywhere with you, use the antiseptic wipe, the pain-killing cream, and the anti-biotic cream, cover the wound securely, and carry the weeping child to a bench for 20 minutes of consoling and temperature-checks.  When your 4th child takes a similar fall, you watch to see if the child notices the fall, and when he does, you calmly dig around in your pocket for a mostly-clean tissue, if you can find one, and push most of the dirt away from the scrape, promising to "take a better look at it when we get home".   Tonight, somehow, a well-fed (hence the lumps), sunbathing gopher snake (no rattle, and a tube-shaped head rather than a spade-shaped one) just did NOT faze me.  Instead, I found myself explaining, in Spanish, to my fellow walker, that the snake was not poisonous, had no rattle and no spade-shaped head, AND, had just eaten recently and was probably very sleepy and content on his patch of sun-warmed pavement.  No, my Spanish isn't that lyrical--more like the Taco Bell Chihuahua meets 8th-grade French class--but I think he got my meaning.  He laughed and smiled as I stepped past the snake and pointed out the lumps in the snake and said "he ate his dinner already", or maybe I said, "I'm going to eat him for dinner", or "nonsense, nonsense, dinner, nonsense, nonsense".

And so I walked on, congratulating myself on my turn toward being Val of the Hills just long enough to get back to my meditations on life at middle-age, and wondering why it has taken me so long to start noticing life, and making a mental note to brush up my Spanish grammar.

Lost and Found

It's now been 8 days since we returned from the trip that was the excuse for this blog, and I'm doing my "accounting".  In the 8,000+ miles we travelled (yes, that includes all the extra miles caused by Madame GPS and her whimsical orders to "In 500 feet, take the exit right." followed by pirouettes through random, sketchy neighborhoods and a return to the freeway) we LOST:

•  my favorite pair of olive-green capri pants
• some high-end shampoo and conditioner
• a pair of Calvin's basketball shorts
• a pair of Calvin's swim trunks
• all respect for Mme. GPS (see above)

With the exception of the last item, all of these things can be replaced.  And the things that we FOUND on this trip are too many to fit neatly in a column, but they include:

• 8 extra pounds on me --ugh (yes, I'm back on the diet/exercise wagon and will work that off)
• many places that we want to visit again, staying longer, bringing Andre (my husband)
• crater-sized mosquito-bite scars on several kids (apparently, my golden-tan California children are delicious to mosquitoes, and allergic to them as well)
• all kinds of rocks, shells, sticks, books (of course), maps, brochures, hand-me-downs from Cousin Henry, and a variety of souvenirs, including several versions of toy weapons, an assortment of pocket knives, a ball-cap from the New York AIDS Walk (thanks, Seth!) a beany-baby buffalo, a stuffed porcupine, a stuffed Tweety Bird and a stuffed "animal" that is shaped like a slice of watermelon (Thanks, Marc! Who, but you, knew that we needed one of those?)

But we also brought home some wonderful memories of backyards and dinner tables, swimming pools and The Atlantic Ocean, sneaking cookies when nobody's looking, Mount Rushmore, majestic mountains, The Brooklyn Bridge, expansive deserts, The National Air and Space Museum, tracking mud into various houses, The Mississippi River, monumental meltdowns over missing shoes, The Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest, Lake Michigan, and the completely huggable early-morning sight of little people snuggled into cozy nests of blankets, in shared beds, with ends of unruly hair and toes sticking out.

And there were the animals who are still part of dinner table conversations that begin, "Do you remember when Lucas (a wonderful bear of a Newfoundland in Connecticut) wouldn't stop following Rhys around and licking him?"  or "It was so funny when Aiko (our golden retriever "cousin" in Chicago) slept on my head."  Peachfuzz, 15 pounds of orange/beige angora fluff with marbles for eyes,and a properly New Yorker version of sangfroid, had a commendable patience for kids who followed him around the Brooklyn apartment he calls home.  Eowyn and Legolas, our feline friends in Oklahoma, also seemed willing to endure the cluelessly lavish attentions of persistent Hedrick kids without drawing blood.  Barnabus, in Baltimore, had my kids in screams of delight with utter golden-retriever-ish spasms of playfulness and Donnie, the 15-year-old Bichon Frise in Spartanburg, seemed completely at home with thundering team of TEN children, rampaging through her house for 24 hours.  I guess, when you're used to six kids, what's 4 more?

If I had a dime for every conversation that included, "We need a house with a bigger yard when we get home, so we can have some goats and a horse" (thanks, Kris & Tom, and Tom&Jill )I'd have paid off our trip already.  Luke and Leia (the baby goats), and, of course, D'Artagnan, Shadowfax, and Scout, are now counted among the characters in my kids' dreams, if their night-time mumblings are any measure.

My kids also found many, many "boring old adult friends of mom", who turned out to be "totally awesome", in the vernacular of the 4-13-year-old set.

By the end of the trip, Rhys was referring to all of our adult male hosts/friends as "The Uncles" and our adult female hosts/friends as "The Aunts", and any of their various children as "our other cousins."   So, I guess it could be argued that what we found on this trip was how large our family has grown.  Thanks so much to Uncle Larry, Uncle Brad, Uncle Tom (x3), Uncle Marc, Uncle Seth, "Uncle Mr. Peterson", Uncle John, Uncle Jimmy,  Aunt Lauren, Aunt Nat, Aunt Kris, Aunt Martha, Aunt Cathy, Aunt Mildred, Aunt Charlotte, Cousin Susan, and Aunt Jill.  It's going to be a bigger family reunion from now on, I guess :-)

Something else I found is that I really would like to keep writing on this blog, for the creative discipline of putting thoughts into words and sharing them.  So, feel free to "subscribe" to notification by email of my postings, by putting your email address into the box at the bottom of this page that says, "Follow by email".  I've allowed Google AdSense to put an advertisement in the sidebar of this blog, to see if it will generate a little income, but what's in those ads is not in my control.  If they get any dumber than what's there now, I will cancel the ad feed, though.  ( I KNOW that none of you are "Over 40 and Single, looking for sincere singles" on the internet, for heaven's sake... yuk.).  

Til later !    Happy trails.

Give us this day our daily breadth.

The kids and I are home now, after yesterday's all-day drive from Barstow, in the Mojave Desert.  We spent a final night in a shiny new Holiday Inn next to the Outlet Mall in Barstow, played a little in the pool, did a little shopping, and then hit the road by noon, arriving home, via the farm country of Brentwood, CA last night around 7:30 p.m.  We were met at the door by a frantically-excited dog, and a smiling Andre: the "pack" was reunited at last.

There's still laundry to do, emails, mail, bills, and phone calls to catch up on, LOTS of things to clean-up, and all the usual business of settling back into our routines after a month away.

But I'm reflecting on something that surprised me about this month-long, more than 8,000-mile adventure:  I LOVED the driving on this trip.  Well, I loved most of the driving, particularly through those places that I'd been warned were "flat and boring":  Wyoming, South Dakota, Southern Minnesota,Oklahoma, North Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California's Mojave Desert.  Apologies to my East-Coast friends, but you can have Pennsylvania, New Jersey, large parts of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.  Maybe those places just felt too familiar to me, or maybe I was just too focused on getting through those areas, to catch up with all the terrific people that I wanted to visit there.

But, I LOVED all those supposedly "empty, desolate" places, particularly the deserts and prairies.  I loved being able to watch sunset's colors change and move from horizon to horizon to horizon. I loved the dry heat.  The high desert has its cool evenings and mornings, and the smell of pinon, smoke, and some kind of sweet grass.   I loved being able to look out across the pastel stripes of Painted Desert and see mountain peaks 120 miles away.  And when we drove (well, almost flew, on those flat, straight, empty desert freeways)  through the lower desert stretches of sagebrush, cactus and Joshua Trees near Needles, CA, at 7:30 at night, with the thermometer reading 111 fahrenheit, I actually insisted that we shut off the AC and open the windows for a few minutes to experience the air that felt exactly like what comes out of a hand-dryer.

In all our wide-open desert and prairie spaces, I experienced something similar to the feeling I get on my morning hikes at home:  breadth.  That sense of being wide, wide open to possibility, wide open to the wind of the Spirit, at home in my own body, and completely free of the press of others' agendas. I tried, a couple of times, to capture in a photograph, that sense of limitless space, but with no success.  What I got was a shot of a minivan in a rest area in a "flat, empty" place in North Texas.  There's no fragrance of sagebrush, no toasty, enveloping wind, no sense of majesty, just a pale sky and a large, beige nothing.

Perhaps that why we think of the deserts as empty and flat.  Photos and film just can't capture that sense of possibility.  But that breadth, that depth, that height of sky is the reason I could be a desert hermit in an alternate existence, as long as my hermitage included an internet connection, so I could write about the silly thoughts that occurred to me, and hear from fellow hermits in other climates from time to time.  I mean, what good is writing and thinking, with no one to share it?

Ok, so I'm not really cut out to be a hermit.  But I could use a good serving of daily breadth, daily.  Care to join me?