Category: Travel

My Journey of States-48 Montana

9/11/2019

A WRITER'S WIT
The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory.
--Ivan Doig
Born June 27, 1939
White Sulphur Springs, Montana
Died April 9, 2015
Seattle, Washington

I. Doig

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 forty-eighth post of fifty.

Montana (2014, 2015)

I first became acquainted with Montana when, as a child, I learned that a great uncle lived there, was superintendent of schools in Miles City for nearly thirty-five years—although I would never visit the state until many years later. In 2014, while visiting South Dakota, Ken and I made a day-trip to cross over into North Dakota and Montana. We returned to the state mid-June 2015, to enter Yellowstone National Park. A mistake tourist-wise—way too crowded—but still, we did attempt to enjoy its stark and majestic beauty. We hope to go back either in May or September one year.

Montana became the forty-first state on November 8, 1889.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky   46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts 47. N. Dakota
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Robert Caro's Working

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My Journey of States-47 North Dakota

9/4/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
—Louis L’Amour
Born March 22, 1908
in Jamestown, North Dakota
Died June 10, 1988
in Los Angeles, California

L. L'Amour

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 forty-seventh post of fifty.

North Dakota (2014)

Our visit to North Dakota was rather abbreviated. We were staying in South Dakota, and one day we got in the car and drove to their neighbor to the north. We had been aware that much in the way of oil drilling was going on because big trucks with oil rig business would pass us on Highway 83. When we actually crossed over the border we saw how intense the drilling was. ND’s area is 70,698 square miles. Its GDP is $52.527 Bn. Forty-four percent of its population of 755, 393 is college educated. And its capital is located in Bismarck.

North Dakota became a state November 2, 1889, the fortieth state to enter the union.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama 45. Nebraska
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky 46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Garrett Peck's The Great War in America: World War I and Its Aftermath.

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My Journey of States-45 Nebraska

8/21/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it.
Ernest K. Gann
Born October 10, 1910
Lincoln, Nebraska
Died December 19, 1991
Friday Harbor, Washington

E. K. Gann

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 forty-fifth post of fifty.

Nebraska (2014)

Ken and I stayed at one of those nondescript road motels that begins with an “H.” The young woman at the desk asked me what brought us to Nebraska. And I told her that I was attempting to log visits to four of my last ten states. She seemed to have an inferiority complex about Nebraska which I’ve witnessed before. One time, I met a young gay man visiting Texas from Omaha. I simply asked him what gay life was like in Omaha, certainly assuming it was better than Lubbock’s, and he got all defensive about it, as if I were making fun. Anyway, I told the woman that driving north on Highway 83, we’d seen some of the most beautiful land ever. Northeast Kansas and southeast Nebraska are not entirely flat, nor entirely agricultural. There is a very pastoral scene there, even if a Nebraska waterway called the Dismal River runs through it. Nebraska, you’ve got some PR to do. You can’t rely entirely on your ‘Huskers to make your name in the world! You need a WillaCatherLand or something.

Nebraska became the thirty-seventh state on March 1, 1867 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2017.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina 43. Washington
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina 44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Andrew Sean Greer's Less: A Novel

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My Journey of States -43 Washington

8/7/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
--Sherman Alexie
Born October 7, 1966
Spokane, Washington

S. Alexie

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 forty-third post of fifty.

Washington (2011)

The only place I’ve visited in Washington is Seattle, where Ken and I embarked on a Holland America ship headed for Alaska (see my profile next week). But we spent a couple of days there before leaving and a day upon return, giving us a good feel for the city. I was surprised by the topography, that it gives San Francisco a run for its money on its steepness, known informally for its “seven hills,” like Rome. Hee hee. I loved the outdoor market, where you can watch the vendors toss a fifteen- or twenty-pound salmon to a paying customer, who’d better catch it. I loved the vibe, the fact that much public art adorns the city, that it was one of the first cities to raise its minimum wage to $12. And then there’s the coffee, ah, the coffee—if you like that sort of thing.

Washington was the forty-second state to be admitted to the union in 1889.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa 40. Idaho
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii 41. Nevada
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia 42. Utah
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

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My Journey of States-40 Idaho

7/17/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Ezra Pound
Born October 30, 1885 Hailey, Idaho
Died November 1, 1972 Venice, Italy

E. Pound

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 fortieth post of fifty.

Idaho (2008, 2010, 2015)

Some places you visit because you know people who live there. In teaching graduate students at Texas Tech summer school, my partner Ken introduced one of his female students to a young English professor who was teaching creative writing at the same time (I believe this to be true). The couple later married, and the professor was instrumental in getting me into the MA program at TTU. Before I could finish my degree, Ann and Daryl moved to Boise, and years later, after Ken and I retired, we visited them at their home, once in summer and once in autumn.

Boise is a well-kept secret, with a fine university. A river running through it (couldn't resist), in fact, a cultivated green belt for athletes, zoo-goers, museum attendees, and fresh-air breathers of all kinds. A great center for cinema, especially the Egyptian Theatre. A breeding ground for writers and authors. Most of all, a humane population. One night, after the four of us had attended a play at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival Amphitheater, the crowd strolled toward a huge parking lot. I figured, as in Texas, that there would be a huge push—cars streaming in all directions—to scramble to the closest exit. I was astounded when, as we reached a certain nexus, a four-way stop, each line of drivers took his or her turn heading for the exit. Ken and I asked if that was normal, and our friends quietly insisted it was. A state that uses a saying like “Drive Friendly” could sure learn something from that genteel bunch of Idahoans. Ken and I confessed that if we’d only encountered the place ten years earlier, we might have retired there. Of course, it just could have been a bunch of talk.

Idaho was the forty-third state to be admitted into the Union on July 3, 1890. Its state bird is the Mountain Bluebird, and it boasts a population of 1.7 million people.

HISTORIC POSTCARDS AND TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota 39. Rhode Island
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

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My Journey of States-39 Rhode Island

7/10/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.
Galway Kinnell
Born February 1, 1927
Providence, Rhode Island
Died October 28, 2014
Sheffield, Vermont

G. Kinnell

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 thirty-ninth post of fifty.

Rhode Island (2003)

I must admit that Rhode Island is one of the fifty states through which I made one of those pass-through visits, as I did with Delaware. However, I feel a literary connection with the state because of one writer, Edith Wharton. If Ken and I had had time, we most surely would have visited her former residence, Land’s End, located in Newport and portrayed in her novel, The Age of Innocence. I visited her other home, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts three times over the period of a decade, and so, upon my return to the state Newport shall be my first stop.

Rhode Island became thirteenth of the original thirteen states, in 1790, and its official name is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan 37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas   30. Georgia
7-Indiana   19. California 31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio 20. Florida     32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi   33. Alabama
10-West VA   22. New Mexico 34. Kentucky
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee   35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia   24. Arizona   36. Vermont

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Milkman by Anna Burns, Booker Prize Winner

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My Journey of States-30 Georgia

11/21/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Tayari Jones
Born November 30, 1970
Atlanta, Georgia

T. Jones

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 thirtieth post of fifty.

Georgia (1990, 1991, 1992, 1994)

The first trip of four that Ken and I made to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, we flew into Atlanta, Georgia. The Atlanta airport was touted as being one of the world’s busiest, and I had no argument with anyone about that, as we busted our rears to get to our gate. Our fourth trip we motored from Texas and drove through a bustling Atlanta, a city I would like to see more of. I would like to visit Savanah. I would like to see where author Flannery O’Connor lived. I would like to see free and fair elections in Georgia before my life ends. That's when I may return to Georgia.

Georgia is fourth of the original thirteen colonies and celebrated its bicenquinquagenary in 2013.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey 25. Michigan
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware 26. Wisconsin
3-Texas     15. New York   27. Minnesota
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut 28. Iowa
5-Missouri 17. Colorado 29. Hawaii
6-Illinois 18. Arkansas
7-Indiana   19. California
8-Ohio 20. Florida
9-Pennsylvania   21. Mississippi
10-West VA   22. New Mexico
11-Maryland 23. Tennessee
12. Virginia   24. Arizona

NEXT TIME: My Book World, The Real Lolita

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My Journey of States-18 Arkansas

8/15/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
“The Arkansas River is ‘the saddest little river / That you ever saw,’ sings Stellrita, the black domestic who dominates the lives of three generations of the family of Zero MacNoo, McGehee’s fictional counterpart in Boys Like Us and Sweetheart. ‘Nobody writes books about it, / Nobody here’s got nothin’ to say. / ’Tain’t ’cause it ain’t worth mentionin’, / It’s just nobody smart stays.’”

Peter Gregory McGehee
Born October 6, 1955 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Died September 13, 1991 in Toronto, Ontario

P. McGehee

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:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana     16. Connecticut
5-Missouri 17. Colorado
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-17 Colorado

8/8/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
You can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.
Ken Kesey
Born September 17, 1935, La Junta, Colorado
Died November 10, 2001, Eugene, Oregon

K. Kesey

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)

1/1

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 POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas   13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma   14. Delaware
3-Texas     15. New York
4-Louisiana   16. Connecticut
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-16 Connecticut

8/1/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Born June 14, 1811 Litchfield CT
Died July 1, 1896 Hartford CT

H. Stowe

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 important 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 sixteenth post of fifty.

Connecticut (1957, 1959, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2012)

The greatest thing about Connecticut may be that it’s not New York. To me, the Merritt Parkway is emblematic of the state: quaint, a bit pastoral, and yet sophisticated. My paternal grandmother lived in Stamford in a smart little apartment many years before moving back to Holland to live out her waning days (she lived to be eighty-eight).

Several of the apartment buildings had green awnings over the main door, and I told my four-year-old brother that one of them was where Grandma lived, as a joke, when I knew it was indeed the one we parked nearest. As soon as we got out of the car, my brother dashed across the busy street to the one I’d said was Grandma’s. My mother knew immediately why he’d done it and practically choked me. I was a bad boy. Thankfully, Vic must have known what he was doing for no catastrophe resulted.

I believe Ken and I drove through the state the very afternoon that Paul Newman’s death was announced on the NPR station we were listening to in our rental, mere miles from where both he and my father had lived, at different times. It seemed like a strange juxtaposition: my father’s birthplace, Paul Newman’s death. To whom was it more of a home?

In 2010 we visited Mark Twain’s home and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s in Hartford. In 2012 we met up with a friend I’d gone to Southwestern College with, who now lives near Hartford. It was a great autumn weekend, and we watched wild turkey feed in my friend’s suburban back yard.

Connecticut is fifth of the original states, having been established in 1788.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas 13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma 14. Delaware
3-Texas 15. New York
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-13 New Jersey

7/11/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Dorothy Parker
Born August 22, 1893, in Long Branch, New Jersey
Died June 7, 1967

D. Parker

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 important 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 thirteenth post of fifty.

New Jersey (1957, 1963)

The man my father’s older sister married, in 1939, was Italian. His father had come from Italy early in the twentieth century. In the sixties, that elderly gentleman lived in Vineland, and a carload of us sojourned from Washington DC one Sunday afternoon to visit Pop F. He was a rotund, white-haired man, quiet-spoken, taciturn to a fifteen-year-old like me. It was boring sitting around while the grow-ups yacked. My cousin, the swimsuit thief, is now probably older than his grandfather was the day we visited him in 1963. My eldest cousin, a college student at the time, winked at me and said, “I’m probably going to get to drive back to DC. Mom and Dad are too drunk.” ¶ The old Italian-American had what seemed like a small farm, compared to my grandfather’s wheat farm back in Kansas, but the man certainly had plenty of fresh vegetables. ¶ New Jersey, the butt of many jokes, is, in part, a bucolic state, not near as urban as its neighbor across the river. NJ is third of the original colonies, became a state in 1787. It celebrated its bicenquinquagenary in 2012.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12-Virginia

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-12 Virginia

5/2/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
William Styron
Born June 11, 1925
Died November 1, 2006

W. Styron

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 important 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 twelfth post of fifty.

Virginia (1957, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1973, 1974, 1989, 1990, 1994, 1999, 2010)

In Northern Virginia, where my aunt and uncle lived in Fairfax County, it was difficult to separate, at times, Washington DC from the southern nature of its surroundings. The lilting dialects, the Georgian colonial architecture with red bricks and white columns. Even the White House is a southern building. And yet my aunt and uncle were New Yorkers; it seemed like an odd fit. In the dozen times that I’ve been to Washington, I’ve viewed multiple sights multiple times: The Smithsonian Institution (including the Air and Space Museum located a thirty-minute cab ride from DC in Fairfax County), the Capitol, the Washington Monument, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s, the World War II Memorial, The Vietnam Memorial (I had previously looked up the address of our Wichita neighbor, R. E. Jenkins, who’d been killed at nineteen, as well as the man for who I’d worn a steel MIA bracelet, Stephen Adams, Iowa), Georgetown, Mt. Vernon, the home of former president, Chester A. Arthur (a bed and breakfast where we stayed in 2010), on Logan Circle. The closest I came to the White House was Pennsylvania Avenue, where I took an iPhone picture through the wrought iron fence. I’ve seen both of Thomas Jefferson’s homes, Monticello and the one in western Virginia, Poplar Forest, a three-day trip by horse cart for its original owner. I’ve strolled through the quad at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where the Jeffersonian buildings provide space for qualified students to live. ¶ Virginia is tenth of the original colonies, established in 1788.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-11 Maryland

4/25/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
Lucille Clifton
Poet Laureate of Maryland
Born June 27, 1936
Died February 13, 2010

L. Clifton

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 important 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 eleventh post of fifty.

Maryland (1957, 1959, 1963)

L-R: Lou, Carol, Richard, Victor | 1963 Visit to DC

In 1963, I was fifteen when we visited Aunt Gladys in Washington, DC. My cousin was seventeen, and he and his sophisticated friends invited me to go with them to the beach in Maryland. On our way we stopped in at Nordstrom’s in the Seven Corners shopping center. I watched as my sophisticated cousin and his friends shoplifted identical plaid swim trunks. We rode out in a red Impala convertible, and when the traffic backed up surprisingly, the driver, one of my cousin’s friends, headed for the soft grass median rather than rear-end someone. ¶ At this Maryland beach, my cousin and his friends looked like they all belonged to the same fraternity and flirted with girls older than they were just for the fun of it. I never told my parents what my cousin had done. It was one of those events that advanced your childhood pretty quickly, traveling with delinquents, and you knew you could never go back. ¶ In the Baltimore neighborhood where my aunt and uncle lived in 1957, people attached ceramic cats, mostly black, to the roofs and sides of their homes, perhaps as a way of identifying theirs as they approached it on the street. My dad bought one before leaving for Kansas and it hung on the side of their house in Wichita for over fifty years. ¶ Maryland became seventh of the original thirteen states in 1788. Its bicenquinquagenary was celebrated in 2013.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-9 Pennsylvania

4/11/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.
Dorothy Allison
Born April 11, 1949

D. Allison

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 important 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 ninth post of fifty.

Pennsylvania (1957, 1959, 1963)

Barges. Coal. Coal dust. On our 1957 vacation, my family and I spent nearly three days in the mountain town of Brownsville, waiting for our Packard Clipper, a ’55, to be repaired. My mother tried hard to find ways to entertain us while we waited around on repairs that could never be made. She took movies of us running up and down the bank of the Monongahela River, me waving a jaunty striped cap I’d gotten for my ninth birthday. “Run, darn you,” my mother said. “It’s a moving picture.” And run we did, like little fools. The hotel where we stayed was so rife with coal dust that Mother had to wipe down everything (including the toilet seat) before we could sit.

The Jesperses' New 1957 Pontiac and Brother Vic

At the end of that brief but drawn-out respite, my parents bought a new 1957 Pontiac, and we broke it in on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was one of the oldest in the nation, and the roads were not that well engineered, not near as sleek as the Kansas Turnpike (you could travel at eighty mph), but it was certainly scenic. ¶ Philadelphia is the city where some of my grandmother’s German cousins lived, but when I try to google the address where they lived, it seems that the street must have disappeared or been renamed. It’s as if they never lived. The city is also where my Dutch grandparents landed in the early 1900s. ¶ Pennsylvania is the second of the original thirteen colonies, established in 1787. Over 230 years old!

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-7 Indiana

2/21/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
Theodore Dreiser
Born August 27, 1871 Terre Haute, Indiana
Died December 28, 1945 California

T. Dreiser

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 important 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 seventh post of fifty.

Indiana (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 1976, 1994)

Shoals was our first stop when my family drove east in 1959. My father put in a good nine or ten hours of driving—over 650 miles and four states in one day. During that trip—before the interstate highway system was complete—we passed through downtown Indianapolis. My mother took a Super 8 film of the experience, flags billowing off some important building. Hot. Exhaust pouring in the windows of our Pontiac. On the second day, my father would drive through three states in one day (Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia), and we would think we were making grand time, but we were in the mountains and it took from dawn to dark to drive 550 miles. We were two hours from my aunt and uncle’s home in Falls Church, Virginia. It would be my third trip to Washington, DC, and I was only eleven!

In 1969, my college choir performed in South Bend, and I was able to visit with the daughter of one of mother’s high school teachers, Jo Leatherman Perkey, who made a special effort to see our performance. The choir had fun touring the Indy 500 track (above). ¶ Indiana is the nineteenth state. Residents celebrated its bicentennial in 2016.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois

NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction

My Journey of States-6 Illinois

2/14/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty—and all the rest of it.
Sam Shepard
Born Fort Sheridan, Illinois Nov. 5, 1943
Died Midway, Kentucky, July 27, 2017

S. Shepard

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 important 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 sixth post of fifty.

6. Illinois (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 2006)

When I was a child, Illinois was one of the four states my dad drove through in a single day as we headed to Washington DC to see my aunt and cousins. Beyond that, Illinois didn’t mean much to me until 1969, when my college choir’s tour included Chicago. In the middle of February with dirty snow piled onto the sidewalks like little mountains, a college friend and I walked under cloudy skies and chatted about what most twenty-one-year-olds do. The choir sang at a Methodist church in Evanston, and as a rising organ pupil I played the postlude. The sanctuary was cold. ¶ Even later, in 1976, Ken and I would venture across the Mississippi River to visit his grandparents’ old farm near Thebes, not far from Huck Finn’s haunt, Cairo. The humidity was so unbearable that we were drenched standing in full shade viewing his grandparents’ graves in the cemetery.

In 2006 we traveled on AmTrak from Fort Worth to New York and changed trains to the Lakeshore Limited in Chicago. We took a brisk walk around during our layover. It was early May, and the trees were just beginning to bud out. We’d already had ninety degree temps in Lubbock, so it seemed that we were stepping back in time.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

Illinois is the twenty-first state. Its centennial was held in 1918. The year 2018 will be another big one. Check it out!

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-5 Missouri

2/7/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
Born November 30, 1835, Florida Missouri
Died April 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut

M. Twain

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 important 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 fifth post of fifty.

5. Missouri (1956, 1957, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1976 + many others)

Richard and Brother Vic and Sister Peggy at Bagnell Dam, Missouri—1956

On my family’s first trip through the Show-Me state, in 1956, we visited Bagnell Dam in the Lake of the Ozarks. I imagine that we took U.S. Highway 54 because it was as a direct shot you could get from Wichita. The trip was a tryout for my brother, who was three at the time, to see how he would take to long periods in the car. During that trip we also visited mother’s family friends in Tipton, not more than an hour’s drive from the dam. We stayed in a mom-and-pop motel, and I witnessed one of the hardest rains I’ve ever seen in my life.

We traveled through Missouri every time we went back East to visit my dad’s family. One memorable sight were the charcoal factories that were nestled among the trees of the rolling hills. Some of them were partnered with rustic establishments where you could breakfast on eggs and smoked bacon. In Brownington is located the grave of my great-grandmother’s first husband, who drowned when, during a rainstorm, he drove a team of horses into a river, drowning him, his horses, and a calf loaded in his wagon. The year was 1884. ¶ My partner Ken’s family are all from the Saint Louis area. In the seventies I began to get a closer look at the state: clear streams and rivers, fried catfish, verdant woods and lawns, friendly people who embraced me as one of their own.

Richard Feeding the Fish at Missouri Hatchery—1976

Historical Postcards

Missouri is the twenty-fourth state. Its centennial was held in 1921, so it won’t be long until another hundred years have passed. I wonder why there is a forty-year gap between Missouri’s and Kansas’s statehood—so close and yet so far.

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas
4-Louisiana

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Barcelona Photographs 2 — The People

2/5/2018

3 Comments

A WRITER'S WIT
Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to thirty pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
William Burroughs
Born February 5, 1914

W. Burroughs

Dear Fellow Travelers,

I offer you the second round of photographs from our November trip to Barcelona. This time I picture primarily the lovely people of that city, from those selling their wares on the street to those joining us as we stroll down one of the grand boulevards. Appreciate your generous comments from last time! RJ

Click on Barcelona Photographs 1 if you missed that installment.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-5 Missouri
More Photographs of Barcelona Once They're Processed!

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My Journey of States-4 Louisiana

1/31/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I think of myself as Rebecca Wells from Lodi Plantation, in Central Louisiana, a girl who was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged creativity and didn't call me lazy or nuts when I dressed up in my mother's peignoirs and played the piano, having painted a small sign decorated in glitter that read “The Piano Fairy Girl.”
Rebecca Wells
Born January 31, 1953

R. Wells

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 important 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 fourth post of fifty.

4 Louisiana (1950-52)

I remember little about Louisiana, except that my family lived in a forty-foot trailer in Pineville, located near the air base at Alexandria. I recall cypress knees that my father brought back to Kansas and sanded to a sheen and varnished, using one to make the base of a lamp, the rest surviving as sculpture occupying various places in our tiny house. I recall the Po Boy sandwich my mother adapted by using “French” bread you bought in those aluminum foil wraps (instead of baguettes), shredded roast beef, topped with a mixture of ketchup, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. This was as spicy as my parents could tolerate, even as young people. Their Kansas palates didn’t care for the traditional sandwich of fried oysters, vegetables, and coarse Creole mustard. The black-and-white photographs taken by a black box camera tell me more than my memory. There are surviving pictures of my sister, coy and cute, poised beneath a large metal bridge all by her lonesome. Shots of us playing in the dirt outside our trailor. Shots of my handsome soldier father in his uniform.

I later visited New Orleans when as a member of the SMU seminary choir we toured there. I remember wearing the choir stole jauntily around my neck as if it were a scarf. Getting a little tipsy along with the other seminarians as we partied on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. My fellow students grinning as if viewing the real me for the first time. ¶ Louisiana is the eighteenth state. Its centennial was held in 1912, its bicentennial, well, you know. One forgets how long the state has been established, part of the Old World, as it were.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on link:
1-Kansas
2-Oklahoma
3-Texas

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-2 Oklahoma

1/17/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Ralph Ellison
Born March 1, 1914
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

R. Ellison

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 important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the second post of fifty.

2 Oklahoma

Oklahoma is the state I traveled through first when I was but a toddler, on the way to Louisiana, where my father was stationed in the Air National Guard for over two years. In time I passed through Oklahoma—north to south, west to east, southwest to northeast, across the panhandle—scores of times, but I never visited anyone, rarely had any business there except to buy gas or stay in a motel, so I wouldn’t have such a long trip to . . . wherever I was headed: Kansas, Texas, Arkansas. ¶ My maternal grandfather, James Brown Richards, did his basic training as a soldier for World War I at Fort Sill in Lawton. The 1918 photographs in the photo gallery below depict a fairly barren place, but now the town has many beautiful tree-lined boulevards, even where the fort remains. After back surgery, I often stayed there as a halfway point between Lubbock, Texas, and Wichita. I would eat at a Chinese restaurant whose name I cannot now recall. ¶ My second trip to Oklahoma came when I was twelve and our church youth drove to visit St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in OKC. I was probably dazzled by the sanctuary at the time, but can recall little of it now. I remember more the dinner afterwards when I ordered fried shrimp. My parents had given me enough money to eat what I wanted . . . I thought. The next day the education director (PG) at the church, who’d been one of the trip sponsors, castigated me for ordering such an extravagant meal when everyone else ate hamburgers and fries. Had I ordered more than I could pay for and the adults had covered for me? Or had the director taken it upon herself to judge me as if she were God? ¶ Oklahoma is a beautiful state, deserves more than a drive-through, particularly the eastern third. Angling northeastward on I-44 in early June, you can see grand rolling hills, even larger ones, the Ouachita Mountains. Unlike the 1930s, when this part of the country suffered great drought, Oklahoma has recently enjoyed anywhere between thirty and fifty inches of rain a year. Verdant stretches of green fields and hedgerows of trees, not to mention veritable forests in the eastern third of the state, as you approach the Ozarks, are eye-popping and inviting. ¶ In 2007, Ken and I, on a trip to Wichita, made a reservation to stay in the Price Tower boutique hotel in Bartlesville. The tower, a Frank Lloyd Wright design, was erected in 1956. The designer had combined what looked like two offices to make one largish hotel room. ¶ The most recent news about Oklahoma is the number of “earthquakes” it has experienced largely, residents assert, because of the practice of fracking by oil companies in the area. The state is also known for one of the last botched executions of a prisoner, when the injection concocted by prison officials did not work properly. ¶ Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state in 1907. Proud Oklahomans celebrated their centennial not that long ago.

Photos 1&2: James Richards on right. Photo 3: James Richards

NEXT TIME: My Book World

My Journey of States-1 Kansas

1/10/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
William Ralph Inge
Born May 3, 1913, in Independence Township, Kansas.

W. Inge

Introduction

Oceanside, Oregon

With a 2015 visit to Oregon I concluded a life-long tour of the United States—only my first, I hope. The Jespers folk who resided on South Main Street in Wichita were not wealthy, so the only road trips we made were to visit family who lived in other parts of the country. Likewise, as an adult I was a public school teacher with little in the way of discretionary savings, but early on, if I needed to do so I would borrow money to make, for example, my first trip to Hawaii.

1977 Queen's Surf, Author on Right

As I paid back my credit union, month by month, I would recall and cherish favorite scenes from my travels. Upon retiring Ken and I have journeyed out at least twice a year. And so now the list is complete. Some states I only visited once and quite briefly at that. Others I’ve returned to again and again. Yet others I’ve resided in. At any rate, through the years I’ve kept journals, scraps of memorabilia, and photographs, and I would like to share what I’ve enjoyed about our fifty states.

Travel is always a good thing, even if it’s only a few hundred miles away, and the wider your travels take you, the more you may learn about yourself and others. One might think that America is this homogenous mass of people, and, in a way national customs and holidays would imply that it is, but at the same time one must realize that Maine is distinctive from Florida and Arizona and Washington and North Dakota and Kansas and Texas.

I hope to put up at least two posts a week about my visits to all fifty states, a journey I began in the 1950s. Some people who embark on this sort of venture say that one must DO something significant in each state. I do not. One state, Delaware, I passed through as a child in less than an hour, but still I do count it toward my total because I must!

Each post relates anecdotes that make my accounts personal, while also giving short factual information about each state, such as its order of entry into the United States, significant celebrations like centennials, and special events or customs. I am posting personal photographs by way of galleries or slideshows, as well as scans of professional post cards I’ve collected through the years. I hope you will come along for the ride! Share your stories under Comments, your photos at Facebook. I begin with the state where I was born.

1 Kansas

When I was old enough to study geography and scrutinize maps, I realized how isolated the state of Kansas was. In 1957, when it took several days to drive from Wichita to the east coast, I realized an even greater disparity that may not be discernible today. Now you can stay in a Holiday Inn Express in the burg of Garden City, one that’s like thousands of other Holiday Inns, but back then the majority of motels seemed to be individually owned and operated. Back then it appeared that the rest of the country was more established, more sophisticated somehow, than the agrarian state of Kansas. ¶ I later realized the place where I was born and raised profoundly affected who I would be for the rest of my life. My mother, for example, lived on a farm until she went to college and then married my father from New York, whom she called an Easterner, but she never stopped using the word “worsh” whether she was speaking of the laundry, or Worshington DC as if she could not discern the difference—never felt entirely comfortable living in Wichita, a city of 350,000 at the time of her death in 2001. ¶ Even though I left Kansas at the age of twenty-two to attend graduate school in Dallas, Texas, I never stopped considering the little boy buried deep in me, the lad who once played on his grandfather’s discarded tractors and combines, who capered along the crumbling banks of the Arkansas River located a couple of blocks from the home I lived in for over twenty years.

Birthday Tractor 1954

On Grandpa's Tractor, 1955 with Kitty

Whenever I return to the tiny Upchurch cemetery outside Norwich, I am overwhelmed by the sense that I might just belong there with my grandparents, my parents, my sister, and piles of other bones from previous generations. The primordial chant, "Rock Chalk Jayhawk," still gives me chills when I hear it on a ball game on TV. ¶ The school I attended, Southwestern College in Winfield, without a doubt, shaped my life. Sixteen hours of music theory formed the backbone of my music degree. Countless hours of rehearsal at the large Reuter pipe organ in Richardson Auditorium culminated in a senior recital of seven or eight pieces. I still have the scores from which I learned all that music. When I listen to my recital tape, transferred to a CD and my iPod, I shiver to think that I was once that accomplished. Below are from my personal collection of historic travel postcards.

Historical Postcards

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—Oklahoma

Barcelona Photographs 1 — Fellow Travelers

1/5/2018

3 Comments

A WRITER'S WIT
Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
Brian Tracy
Born January 5, 1944

B. Tracy

Dear Fellow Travelers,

This first installment of my Barcelona Photographs—made during UMC's Seniors Are Special trip in November—is comprised of as many candid shots I could get of our group of thirty-two. In the coming days I'll also post photographs of the region's architecture and its colorful people. Stay tuned!

NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction 2018

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Forty-One Years Later, Minus One

2/14/2017

0 Comments

A WRITER'S WIT
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
A. A. Milne

NOTE: I wrote this post a year ago. For reasons I can't recall I decided not to put it up. Today Ken and I celebrate our forty-first anniversary together, and I share last year's post belatedly!

Ken and I met forty years ago, in 1976, at a rather notorious bar, late at night on Valentine's Day. Located off Marshall, David’s Warehouse of Lubbock, Texas, was a foreboding place, like a remote outpost of a foreign land. Eerie fluorescents contributed to an apprehensiveness, almost a fear, and patrons' cars were clumped close like horses with their reins loosely tied around a hitching post. Inside, amid the warmth and the steady thump of disco music someone introduced us. Ken asserts that I had been snubbing him for weeks. I maintain that I was just shy. In those days I felt compelled to pound down three beers at my apartment before heading out to face the meat rack at David's.

Well, we now talk as little about that as possible—just what followed. Seeing each other every day—Ken would bring little gifts like tiny potted cacti—we became acquainted rather quickly, and by June made the decision to move in together. We had an open house, and a few of the items we received—some dessert plates and four blue plastic glasses—are still part of our daily use.

Not long after that we made the trip to Kansas and Missouri and Michigan, to introduce our newly formed union to, respectively, my family, Ken's family, and friends where he’d taught in Kalamazoo. It was like a honeymoon. We even took a mini-cruise by placing our yellow Datsun on a ferry that transported us from northern Michigan to Green Bay, a pleasant four-hour voyage.

Our first seven years were the most difficult. It was the 1970s! Open Marriage, the Sexual Revolution, and Gay Liberation all conspired to make us think we could have it all—that is, have every man we saw, plus the one at home. AIDS, whose clutches we were fortunate enough to escape (don’t think that we don’t still suffer some survivor’s guilt), made us stop and think. Once we committed only to one another, what, I suppose, history had been trying to tell us, we became much closer, committed.

In 1986, for our tenth anniversary, we threw a party. Ken gave me a ring with a fire agate as the setting. Funny story: years after his Grandfather Dixon died, Ken watched as his Grandmother cleaned out a drawer. He eyed his grandfather's gold dental work and asked if he could have it. His grandmother was more than glad to be rid of a ghost's smile. Prior to our special day he asked a jeweler friend to shape the gold into a ring. In the future, whenever Ken's relatives would comment on my beautiful ring, he and I would exchange winks. I even think you could hear his grandfather chuckle. In a similar vein, the ring I presented to Ken was made, in part, from my discarded wedding ring.

BELOW: Left, the ring Ken gave me and his Kappa Alpha frat pin. Right, the ring I later gave Ken and my Phi Mu Alpha pin. We occasionally wear the pins on a night out, our little joke.

In 1996 we celebrated our twentieth anniversary with a Hawaiian cruise. The eight-day voyage was only marred by the day on which we left Honolulu, the very morning the bomb went off in Atlanta. At the airport, everyone’s luggage was dump-searched, and we arrived home exhausted. What survives, however, are great memories of cruising the peaceful Pacific.

Having never traveled much by train, we celebrated our thirtieth in 2006 by taking Amtrak from Fort Worth to New York, by way of Chicago. During the forty-eight-hour trip in First Class, we reminisced about our first thirty years, some of the same things we’d always reminisced about when we got sentimental: our beginning at a tawdry bar in north Lubbock. But what else? Art. Music. Literature. Film. Gossip. Very little ever seemed out of range for our discussions. And as with all good friends, we daily seem to pick up where we left off last time we talked.

So here we are again, Sunday night, February 14, 2016—our fortieth anniversary, the same night of the year as always. We usually avoid eating out—selecting an adjacent evening—not finding it very festive to celebrate such a special day with the hoi polloi and their sentimental frills like chocolates and roses. That’s just not us. I take charge of glasses. Oh, get the doorbell, would you. It is our pizza! Then an episode of Downton Abbey. Later, we raise our glasses to the next ten years, and the next! We, same as Mr. Milne, can hope, can’t we!

BELOW would appear some photos from our fortieth-anniversary trip, a Caribbean cruise to Aruba, Panama, Columbia, Costa Rica, and the Caymans . . . ONLY WE NEVER GOT TO GO!

Due to a health crisis in our duo, we were forced to cancel our October trip at the last minute. When Ken would share with the nurses and doctors at University Medical Center that we were to have celebrated our fortieth on the cruise, most emitted an authentic "Awww." Gee, how the world has changed. Forty years ago we wouldn't have even shared such information with strangers, especially those holding needles. Since our travel insurance check arrived, we are determined to go SOMEWHERE for our forty-first year. Now the fun comes in deciding WHERE?

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Portals of War and Peace

11/14/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?
Karen Armstrong
Born November 14, 1944

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Larry Towell / Magnum

November 14, 2016, Mohsin Hamid, “Of Windows and Doors”: Saeed and Nadia, a young unmarried couple, seek to escape their war-torn city. ¶ Hamid’s elegant prose and subtle omniscience take the reader inside the war of collateral damage. Both have lost family and friends. As the title suggests, both windows and doors figure importantly. Windows, once broken out by bombs or bullets, are really not capable of being resealed, but people attempt to do so with bookshelves, mattresses, or packaging tape and cardboard.

“A window was the border through which death was possibly likeliest to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire” (71).

Doors, too, alter in their significance, become a means of escape
. . . or doom, life or death:

“Nadia, who had not considered the order of their departure until that moment, and realized that there were risks to each, to going first and to going second, did not argue but approached the door, and drawing close she was struck by its darkness, its opacity, the way that it did not reveal what was on the other side and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end, and she turned to Saeed and found him staring at her, and his face was full of worry and sorrow, and she took his hands in hers and held them tight, and then, releasing them, and without a word, she stepped through” (76-7).

The story limns not only all wars but specifically the war that threatens one the most, the war happening where one lives now. Hamid’s novel, Exit West, comes out in March 2017.
Photography by Larry Towell/Magnum.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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Over Paths Well Worn

10/15/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Born October 15, 1844

My Book World

McMurtry, Larry. Roads: Driving America's Great Highways. New York: Simon, 2001.

“I wanted to drive the American roads at the century’s end, to look at the country again, from border to border and beach to beach” (11). With this statement, McMurtry begins his travel book, which is not so much about the places he sees—although he does go into some detail about literary people, places, events—as much as it is about the roads that take him there. McMurtry loves to drive and not along those quaint roads where you can get stuck behind a slow-moving RV or semi, but the big ones, the Interstates. And every road he introduces with the article, t-h-e: the 15, the 40, the 35. He’ll often take a plane to a target city, rent a car, and drive back to his native Archer City in Texas.

Some nuggets:

“My casual intention, in thinking about these journeys, was to have a look at the literature that had come out of the states I passed through. For Minnesota there is not a whole lot. Scott Fitzgerald, though a native son, spent most of his life east of Princeton or west of Pasadena. His work seems to me to owe little or nothing to the [M]idwest. Louise Erdrich lives in Minneapolis now, but most of her work is set well to the west, near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota” (30).

“Most Mexicans still feel that they have an innate right to be on the north side of the [Rio Grande] river, where their grandparents or great-grandparents lived. The Border Patrol can deport them, but it can’t extinguish this feeling” (54). If only Texans especially would understand this idea.

“Despite the Army Corps of Engineers’ elaborate strategies for controlling the lower Mississippi, most people who know and love the river know that it is more powerful than many plans human beings may design: one day it may rise up in flood and take out much of southern Louisiana, blowing through human constraints as easily as Moby Dick blew through the whaling boat” (68) LM wrote this in 2000. Not too prescient, eh?

“Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years” (185). This anecdote speaks for itself.

Occasionally McMurtry allows his prejudices to overpower his reason: “I’m not entirely comfortable in Idaho—fortunately it’s only seventy-five miles across the Idaho panhandle from Coeur d’Alene over the hills to Montana. I suppose my discomfort has to do with the Aryan Brotherhood and similar organizations, several of which make their official home in Idaho. In no state is there such obvious hatred of law and government—hard to explain, since there is scant evidence that there is much law and government in Idaho. A lot of frontier types who aren’t quite up to Alaska hang out there, secure in the knowledge that they’re in part of the country where the outlaw mentality is still encouraged” (195).

Once, while with friends in Boise, Idaho, following our attendance of a play set in an outdoor amphitheater, we and our hosts got in the car. I dreaded the wait for all of those vehicles to vacate the huge parking lot (recalling how savagely impolite most Texans are when it comes to their own motto of Drive Friendly), but I was hugely surprised when, at a certain juncture, as if there were a four-way stop, drivers politely took their turns until each car, of the hundreds, had made its way to the exit—all without frenzy, all without rancor or rudeness, and in record time. Surely such a land is not as bad as McMurtry makes out. Think of all the wise academics at Idaho universities. Think of all the Mormons and other religious people who make their homes in Idaho. Are they all to be tainted by a group such as the Aryan Brotherhood? Come on, Larry.

And talk about hatred of government: once when I was on a trip with forty other West Texans to visit the city of Ottawa, Canada, a majority of my fellow travelers booed the very mention of our president’s name. You see, this particular bakery had dared to rename their maple leaf cookie the Obama cookie. I never felt so ashamed to be an American in my life. I personally HATED George W. Bush, but I NEVER would have booed his name in any public setting, particularly in a foreign country—because much as I detested him and his policies, he was still my president. Larry, please, no more generalizations about people who hate or don’t hate. They’re just not relevant. We are all capable of hate in almost any context. I certainly won't let this one slip prevent me from loving your book!

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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Montana (2014, 2015)

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North Dakota (2014)

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Nebraska (2014)

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Washington (2011)

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Idaho (2008, 2010, 2015)

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Rhode Island (2003)

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Georgia (1990, 1991, 1992, 1994)

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Arkansas (1967-68, 2009, 2010, 2012)

Colorado (1964, 1965, 1967, 2000, 2011)

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Connecticut (1957, 1959, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2012)

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New Jersey (1957, 1963)

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Virginia (1957, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1973, 1974, 1989, 1990, 1994, 1999, 2010)

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Maryland (1957, 1959, 1963)

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Pennsylvania (1957, 1959, 1963)

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Indiana (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 1976, 1994)

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6. Illinois (1957, 1959, 1963, 1969, 2006)

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5. Missouri (1956, 1957, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1976 + many others)

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4 Louisiana (1950-52)

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2 Oklahoma

Introduction

1 Kansas

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