I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains. |  G. Martin |
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-24 Arizona
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MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-third post of fifty. TENNESSEE (1974) When my in-laws came to Lubbock, in 1974, to see their daughter receive her master’s degree from Texas Tech, they brought bags of money with them (well, it seemed like it), and the four of us drove to Washington, DC, where then wife and I interviewed for teaching jobs with the same district in Fairfax County, Virginia. We took I-40 for much of the way, through the long, slim state of Tennessee, spending one night there. By that time in August, it was cool and rainy, and we did no sightseeing: no Graceland, no Grand Ole Opry, no Hermitage. More the reason to go back one day. Tennessee was the sixteenth state admitted to the union and celebrated its bicentennial in 1996. No wonder the people of Tennessee are so proud of their Vols. Their state goes back to the eighteenth century! historical postcardsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-23 Tennessee
My Book World  Pam H., R. Jespers, K. Dixon, 2005, Taos I first heard Pam Houston speak in 2000 when she gave a reading for her new book, Waltzing the Cat. As she addressed a sizeable audience, and, as I met her afterward at a reception I told myself if I ever got a chance to take one of her workshops I would. I managed three: Taos, 2004 and 2005; I even journeyed to Mallorca, Spain to study with her. I didn’t do so as a groupie necessarily (though I am); it took me three different week-longers to digest her method for creating fiction—a method that resonated with me, using one’s own life and one’s own observations to create narrative.
I’ve always admired Houston’s ability to transform intensely autobiographical information into strong fiction. Some writers refuse to touch such material; others wallow in their biographies like dogs in the dust, trying but failing to rid themselves of their demon fleas. Pam has been the most influential contemporary writer, in that respect, on my thinking about writing. She taught me how to transform my autobiographical material, or perhaps she taught me to give myself permission to do so because by being that honest writers can hurt someone they love or even people they don’t. And you have to balance your honesty against how much you value the relationship, and honesty doesn’t always lose out. Anyway . . . I feel that I was in on the inception of Contents, as well as several of its chapters because during class or at a meal, Pam would share an anecdote that eventually wound up in this novel. In 2008, at a Point Reyes bookstore, I heard her read one of the book’s short chapters-in-progress. At the time, she planned, I think, to write 144 of those chapters giving voice to the many hundreds of trips she had taken around the world, the hundreds of places she had visited in the States, the myriad human beings who had influenced her life. Why 144? “I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves” (308), Pam declares in the very last section of her book, the “Reading Group Guide.” She ends up with 132 chapters and 12 airplane stories, but still, I think she delivers on her original plan. The novel feels very global, in its fast-paced, jet-flight episodes knitted together like bones on the mend. How else could she portray a trip around the world, one which may never end as long as she lives? Both Pam-the-person and Pam-the-author nearly lose their lives as four-year-olds when their fathers seriously abuse them, and their mothers cover up the story, amuse themselves through retelling it over cocktails, falsehoods about her pulling large pieces of furniture over on top of herself. Nearly losing their lives gives both Pams permission to push their lives to the limits because otherwise they might not be worth living. Planes that almost fall out of the sky. Boyfriends who don’t work out. Bedeviled by chronic pain since the childhood accident. . . neither Pam is comfortable unless her contents have shifted a bit since her last outing. She must be on the move, searching for that next glimmering glimpse of life, whether it is of a Tibetan monk or the life of a child whom she helping to raise. She must move. Such a novel reflects the life that Pam lives, right? In any given year, Pam-the-author is equally at home on her ranch in Colorado, which she purchased after the phenomenal success of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, equally at home on campus, equally at home teaching scores of workshops or giving readings, equally at home traveling to remote parts of the world to test her physical or emotional strength, equally at home revealing the parental abuse she was subject to as a child, lovers who have betrayed her. In this book, in particular, she manages to transform the latter three issues into a gross of clipped chapters, in which Pam-the-character (in the manner of Christopher Isherwood naming his protagonist Herr Issywoo after himself) makes herself at home on flights to Exhuma in the Bahamas, to places as obscure as Ozona, Texas. Tibet. New Zealand. Paris. Chapters named with a flight number: UA #368. Your life, as long as you are reading this book, is as discombobulated as Pam-the-character’s. You live it with her, the flashback in which Pam-the-character is hospitalized for injuries caused by her abusive father. Pam Houston—the author—gives her all to every minute that she lives, I would suspect, even when she is lying very still, devouring the pages of a new book or romping with her Irish wolfhounds through the meadowlands of her ranch. As long as she is breathing, she is inhaling the content of her next book, itself spinning inside her brain while all she seems to do is become a vessel for it, channeling the narrative burning inside her at that moment. That is what Contents May Have Shifted is about. After having been moved and enlightened by her first four books, I can now say the same for this one. And Pam Houston’s new tome, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, comes out January 29, 2019. You’d better believe I’ve already ordered it, that I can’t wait to begin feasting on her pages once more. You see, I’m still learning from Pam. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-23 Tennessee
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Contents May Have Shifted
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-second post of fifty. New Mexico (1972-2018)L to R, T to B: B&W images, Santa Fe | Ken and Friend Naomi in Taos | Larry & Deb, Cloudcroft | Larry, White Sands The first time I visited New Mexico was during the Christmas holidays in 1972, when M, my then wife, and I rented a crude little cabin in the skiing village of Cloudcroft. Thirty months into our wedded bliss, she and I were experiencing problems. I was in therapy and had given myself permission to sleep in a separate bed. Such a policy did not make for a very felicitous first Christmas vacation away from the folks, but I made the best of it. We both took a morning of skiing lessons. Every time I encountered M, her legs were splayed, still trying to master the snowplow—so unlike the graceful woman who handled water skis as if they were duck’s feet (not a comment on their size). I wasn’t magnificent, but I was able to come down one of the minor paths without stopping, falling, or tumbling—all afternoon long. And . . . I met a nineteen-year-old young un who thought I was pretty swell and struck up a recurring conversation as he and I met at the bottom of the run. Making my home in West Texas for over forty years, I’ve sojourned to New Mexico innumerable times: Albuquerque and Taos for writing workshops and to visit friends; Santa Fe for Thanksgivings at the La Fonda Hotel; visits to Roswell, Cloudcroft, Ruidoso, Carlsbad, and more. Ken and I might have moved there at any time, save for one factor: $$. New Mexico is a very expensive state in which to live, particularly Santa Fe and Taos. New Mexico has a history more ancient than the length of its statehood would indicate. The Spanish intersected with the indigenous people about 1598. The French in the 1700s. The Texans in the 1800s. No wonder those with Texas tags on their cars still get dirty looks (or worse) when they pass over the state line. At any rate, New Mexico is the site of more art, more poetry, and more novels than one can name in one breath. To visit the Land of Enchantment is to visit gentle people and gorgeous scenery. As the forty-seventh state, New Mexico celebrated its centennial in 2012. HISTORICAL POSTCARDSIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Contents May Have Shifted
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-22 New Mexico
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-22 New Mexico
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twenty-first post of fifty. Mississippi (1971, 1994)
I first saw Mississippi in 1971 when I was almost twenty-three years old. The Bahamian woman I’d married had an aunt who lived in Laurel. For spring break we borrowed a friend’s Ford Galaxie station wagon and traversed the five hundred miles on I-20 and a few other roads. My ex-wife’s aunt, a smoker, was so unlike her sister, my mother-in-law, and yet the aunt was similar to my ex-wife in that America also had corrupted her cute little Bahamian accent. But M and I had a cozy double bed to ourselves and as still-newlyweds who couldn’t think of anything better to do, we made good use of it.  The second time I encountered Mississippi was in 1994 when another spouse, Ken, and I drove from Lubbock to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We stopped long enough in Vicksburg to view the Mississippi River near the famed bridge, and then we were off. I would like to return one day, to find out more about Mississippi's literary figures: Faulkner and Welty, to mention a couple. Mississippi, the twentieth state, celebrated its bicenntenial in 2017. Historical Postcards & Trunk DecalsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-21 Mississippi
My Book World Potter, Margaret Yardley. At Home on the Range. With a foreword by Elizabeth Gilbert and introduction by the author. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012. This book was originally published by Potter in 1947 and may be the second cookbook I’ve ever read from cover-to-cover (the other, Mildred O. Knopf’s Memoirs of a Cook). Often, I’ll casually peruse the contents, checking out the ingredients of a particular recipe, to see if I might like to prepare it. But At Home on the Range is no ordinary cookbook. The author seems to create a story with each recipe. Even its presentation on the page defies modern conventions where one lists the ingredients above and directions below. No, Potter’s entire recipe is frequently a delightful but informative narrative, giving one the most minute detail about how to prepare it. Here is a notable example: CHICKEN CACCIATORE is made for six with 2 three-pound frying chickens cut up, dusted with flour, salt and pepper, and browned in ½ cup of olive oil. Fish out the chicken, put the pieces in a casserole, and add to the oil a chopped garlic clove, 1 cup of chopped onions, and an optional pinch of sweet basil and rosemary. When the onions are soft, pour in 1 can of tomatoes and 2 tablespoons of tomato paste. Let this simmer for 15 minutes. Pour over the chickens, cover tightly, and cook in a 350° oven for 45 minutes. Serve it with buttered boiled spaghetti, and pass the grated Romano or Parmesan cheese (51). I’ve prepared perhaps a half a dozen different recipes for chicken cacciatore (my late Italian uncle informed me cacciatore means “of the hunter,” intimating a certain flexibility of contents), but I find this one fascinating. First, Potter uses different phraseology, “dusted with flour,” instead of perhaps the more common “dredged;” she specifies “fish out the chicken,” instead of “remove the chicken”; “pass the Romano or Parmesan cheese” instead of “sprinkle with,” subtly indicating that cheese is an option. “Buttered boiled spaghetti,” however, sounds a bit redundant to today’s ear. Second, Potter departs from most cacciatore recipes by preparing the sauce separately and then pouring it over the chicken; most directions require one to add all ingredients following the browning of the chicken (usually with garlic and onion). And finally, her recipe is baked in the oven instead of simmering in a skillet or Dutch oven.
Overall, Potter’s directions are exacting yet flexible, her opinions strong, so much so that I shall have to try this one, too, just to see how it tastes—not to mention the other two dozen recipes I’ve marked with Post-It arrows! McSweeney’s has recreated the original end papers and added engaging chapter fonts, as well as pert little illustrations, giving the book its historical and artistic due. If you love to cook AND read, you'll love this book. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-21 Mississippi
NEXT TIME: My Book World
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the twentieth post of fifty. FLORIDA (1968, 1984, 2003) St. George Hotel, Spanish Wells, Bahamas The first time I visited Florida, it was to pass through by way of Miami onto the Bahamas, a far superior spot, I believed. My plane, a two-prop job resembling a large goose, nearly went down in a violent thunderstorm, or so I was inclined to believe. I was head-over-ankles in love with a girl for the first time in my life, or otherwise I would never have traveled that far to stay in the home of strangers who just happened to be that girl’s parents. Two years later I would marry her and we would be given a large formal wedding in Trinity Methodist Church of Nassau and a formal reception at the Sheraton British Colonial Hotel. A friend from college would fly down to play the organ for the service. My brother, seventeen, would join the party as my best man and promptly get a bit drunk from drinking too much champagne.  R. Jespers, Bahamas, 1970 After spending more than two months in the Bahamas, I got a little sick of island life. It had never occurred to me, a landlubber, that I would tire of seeing the same people every day, that if all you had to do at the beach was grow browner, the experience might wear thin. That a city with only one movie theater was probably a little devoid of culture. I was too young to accept life as it comes to you, that the Bahamians have a unique culture going back hundreds of years. Though I would later divorce one really beautiful Bahamian, I would always recall the island’s inimitable treats: broiled crawfish, conch salad, peas and rice, and, oh God, baked grouper! Water skiing and hand trawling from a seventeen-foot outboard boat over swells larger than some hills in Kansas (see my catch above). And always aquamarine waters, a hue from which people concocted the idea to paint swimming pools.  Key West would be my destination in 1984, when I would tag along with two scuba-diving fiends, uh, friends. We stayed at an ever-popular gay establishment, The Pines bed and breakfast. Enough said. Again, got browner. Gorged myself on seafood, and, though my life partner was not with me, I behaved myself and only flirted with men gathered around the B&B’s tiny pool. Ten years later, one of the friends would die of AIDS, but I shall always recall the gales of laughter the three of us could create via those tiny in-jokes that only intimates can tell.  R. Jespers, Key West, 2003 In 2003, I attended a writers’ conference in Key West. A famous gay writer I’d always admired conducted our seminar, and I was pleased to be part of the group. I went in January thinking that the weather would be pleasant. I arrived in a gale of wind out of the north, and at the hotel I was placed in a freestanding cabin with no heat. No heat. I piled a couple of quilts on my bed, and that seemed to do the trick. In the remaining time, weather remained cool, almost like bright autumn days in New England! I purchased a heavy sweatshirt because I’d failed to heed the email warning sent by the conference’s leader. It was anything but a fun-in-the-sun event I’d anticipated. Note to self: never take another January trip to Florida. It may be just as nice in West Texas at that time of the year. Florida, the twenty-seventh state, celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1995. If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-21 Mississippi
My Book World Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. With a new introduction by the author. New York: Anchor, 2017. I suppose I always felt this book, originally published in 1986, was a woman’s book—chick lit—but after viewing the MGM/Hulu production of Atwood’s novel, I believe I was wrong. A dystopian world in which women are nothing more than baby makers and terribly devalued if they cannot deliver is not a world any of us want to live in. Such a world is also one in which all human beings are devalued, consigned to rigid gender and social roles. Atwood herself may articulate the novel’s greatest value in her new introduction: “But there’s a literary form I haven’t mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the world’s indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her secret annex” (xviii). Indeed. A novel in which almost half of the chapters are entitled “Night”—and are alternated with ones like “Jezebel’s” and “Salvaging”—readers should be duly warned that we, too, could descend into a world of moral darkness, that we should take heed from this, our literature of witness.
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-20 Florida
NEXT TIME: My Book World
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the nineteenth post of fifty. California ('67, '77, '78, '97, '06, '08)When I visited California, in 1967, my aunt and uncle lived in Fullerton, Orange County. I was nineteen, and I had been encouraged by my mother to take side trips rather than hang around my aunt’s house all the time. I would negotiate such a concept much better later in life. The three weeks that I was there, my aunt drove me to Whittier to visit a friend I’d made while in college, also an organ student. My sixteen-year-old cousin and I took the train to San Clemente to the beach. And we made a similar trip to Disneyland. Finally, my aunt and uncle lent me their car so I could drive to Long Beach to see the S——s, a family who had once lived two houses south of us on Main Street in Wichita. Mr. S—— worked for a Long Beach newspaper, and Mrs. S—— was a registered nurse. Both of them smoked like chimneys at Christmas. I made it my reading project to finish Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls,a summer read if ever there was one. You devour the pages just to see what happens, usually who does whom, only to feel less than satiated when it’s over—like eating a bag of potato chips in less than five minutes.
In the seventies, I visited a couple, the wife of whom I’d gone to high school with. During another trip I stayed with a guy I’d met in Hawaii the summer before. There I got the gist of what my mother had tried to teach me. I made a day-long sojourn out to see the Queen Mary in Long Beach, and three of us guys would drive up the coast to San Francisco to march in one of the first gay pride parades in 1978. I also saw the Hearst Mansion in Big Sur before it became part of the California State Park system; I visited it once again in 1997, making the trip up the mountain three times in one day to see all three tours.  K. Dixon and R. Jespers | Tomales Bay, CA 2006 In 2006 I attended a writers’ conference in Tomales Bay, and two years later I would return to the conference on one evening to hear the keynote speaker, Jane Smiley, a writer whom I admire a great deal. I have a phobia of returning to California. I believe the Big One is slated to happen any time soon, and I just don’t want to chance it. Besides, it is one of those places long on beautiful sights and fabulous weather but also long on two-legged inhabitants, thousands of whom insist on being in the exact spot you would like to be whether it’s a queue to see Bette Midler or a trail in the woods. California became the thirty-first state in 1850, thus celebrating its sesquicentennial in 2000. If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-19 California
NEXT TIME: My Book World
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the eighteenth post of fifty. Arkansas (1967-68, 2009, 2010, 2012) Arkansas River Why do natives of Arkansas pronounce the state the way they do but call themselves AR-kanzuns, and not Arkansawyers? (I think we know why.) Why is the river whose headwaters begin in Colorado and pass through the state of Kansas called the AR-Kanzus River, but when it reaches Arkansas it becomes, well, you know? One state’s denizens feel superior to the other’s because each group feels it is so right. I know, because I’ve lived among both camps. Several people on my block in Wichita had relatives in Arkansas, and a couple of others moved to Northwest Arkansas to retire. My first trip to Arkansas came in the late sixties when, once again, my college choir’s annual tour ran through that state. We sang at a civic auditorium in Rogers to a fairly large crowd. We stayed with a host family I cannot now remember anything about.  My second encounter with Arkansas came over forty years later when I obtained a two-month residency at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, located in the northwest quadrant of the state. It was the first time since college since I’d lived alone. Ken flew up for a week to stay in the area. I would write in the mornings in my one-bedroom suite at the colony (where guests were not allowed to stay) and then we would meet up at his motel in the afternoon to sight see. Over thirty inches of rain fell during that two-month period; it must have rained at least fifty percent of the time, including much of Ken’s visit, so we didn’t get to see much. He’d attended the University of Arkansas for his MFA, so he was well acquainted with the area, but it had changed a great deal. Northwest Arkansas now boasts over 525,000 residents, larger than some self-contained cities—and its character seems largely suburban sprawl.  We returned in 2010 and 2012 to visit a friend who had once lived in Lubbock. At that time we went to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum. It was in May before the weather became hot and humid, and weather was beautiful. Arkansas bears the distinction of being the nation’s twenty-fifth state, who celebrated its centennial in 1936. 347 If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-18 Arkansas
My Book World Coates, Ta-Nehisi. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. New York:One World, 2017. Of necessity this book is a sad one. It tells a truth, or many truths, really, that white people in our country must come to grips with—namely that our white ancestors committed crimes against black slaves and that, as descendants, we have failed and continue to fail to atone for their sins. “If you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity—not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience—then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country” (54). One point, among many, that Coates makes resoundingly is that the great wealth that has been with this country from the beginning was made off the backs of black slaves, free labor. If poor white families had had to harvest all that cotton themselves such wealth would never have been accumulated. And that’s why some citizens of places like Mississippi are still embittered today: “In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country” (183). Those individuals may feel that their legacy was stolen from them, but they fail to think of the legacy stolen from black slaves: their lives and the lives of their descendants.
Whites could do with a healthy dose of walk-a-mile-in-my-shoes kind of empathy. Coates quotes one man: “‘When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours’” (195). In Coates’s introduction he makes clear that the eight years he is talking about—Obama’s eight years in power—are shadowed or echoed by an earlier period in the late nineteenth century, when black citizens, as part of Reconstruction, ran the state of South Carolina. Eight years only because whites took that away from them. Each of the eight essays in this book is a championing statement that clarifies the history of African-Americans: “The Legacy of Malcolm X,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” “My President Was Black” concludes this book which must be required reading for all Americans. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-18 Arkansas
NEXT TIME: My Book World
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the seventeenth post of fifty. Colorado (1964, 1965, 1967, 2000, 2011)  In my youth I was a church goer, mostly by default, de fault of my mother (har har). Our youth group spent two different week-long sessions in retreat at a cabin our minister owned near Silverton. It was a ten-hour drive from Wichita, and some of we luckier kids rode in the education director’s car, which had a rather new innovation: factory-installed air conditioning. You weren’t exhausted from the wind whipping your face hour after hour or from its roar in your ears. Your skin didn’t stick to the seats. She even let some of us drive! The retreats were great. Short on Bible and theological discussions and long on FUN. We hiked, made day-long climbs up particular mountains, cooked outside. And it was cool! No AC was needed as it was back in Wichita. On my flight back from LA in 1967, my plane stopped in Denver. As I was flying standby, I was bumped from the flight to Wichita . . . late at night. I called my mother to explain what had happened. She encouraged me to spend the night in the airport, just sleeping on a bench, as she had during World War II, waiting for a train. I’d seen too many movies about people sleeping on hard benches and declared that I was staying in a motel. And I then lifted one of those white courtesy phones connected directly to a motel and took its shuttle. The room cost me eleven dollars, and I tipped the bell hop fifty cents and had no idea whether that was too much or too little. It had just rained and was in the mid-fifties. The air, after I had lived with the smog-filled air of LA for two weeks, seemed splendiferous, providing a natural AC. In this century we’ve stayed with friends in Grand Lake (2000) and in Denver (2000 & 2011). In 2014 we drove widely around Denver on E-470, a toll road, not really wishing to partake of its urban sprawl. We spent the night in Pueblo, taking short trips out to see things such as Rosemount and the raptor center. The Colorado Centennial was celebrated in 1976, the same year as the nation’s bicentennial year, the same year Ken and I began our longtime relationship. HISTORICAL POSTCARDSIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-17 Colorado
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
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