Swimming Upstream One of my prized possessions from my mother is an odd poem in a silly little gilded frame that goes: Most any poor old fish can float And drift along and dream: But it takes a regular LIVE ONE To swim against the stream It is attributed to a Maurine Hathaway, a woman nicknamed The Poetess of the Pines. She was one of the contributors of these little ditties to a guy by…
Thursdays Suck I suspect that many people, probably the same ones who invented Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF), have felt that Mondays are the day of the week that sucks the most. Needless to say, this likely has mostly to do with the need to go back to work or school come Monday, and the fact that that represents an obligation rather than a desire. There are plenty of songs and accolades to Saturday and…
Aye, There’s the Rub Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “To sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there’s the rub…”. It is part of the great “to be or not to be” soliloquy and I have a new take on the whole affair. Hamlet was very troubled, to say the least, and was contemplating death by suicide. I love life and am way too much of a chicken to ever come within a mile of that contemplation, but…
In the Den I am home after five weeks away. We arrived home yesterday afternoon with enough time to unpack our car and generally shake off the physical issues of our 8,000 mile cross-country extravaganza. I drove every one of those miles and remind Kim of that every time I want her to do something for me. I think after 24 hours, I have run that line of reasoning into the ground and will have…
Hearst Castle I first saw Hearst Castle in 1981 with my father and my first wife, Mary. We were going from his place in Marina del Rey on the beach up to his country estate in the San Joaquin Valley, specifically Visalia. It wasn’t so very much out of the way and it gave us the chance to taste Anderson’s Pea Soup and stay st the Madonna Inn. But it was San Simeon that really…
In the Half-Light There is a favorite line at the end of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs. Through It where Robert Redford as the narrator talks of the aging of the protagonist, Norman. He references him as a fly fisherman who is too old to fish the big waters of the rivers around Missoula. Montana, but does so anyway. He does it in the half-light of the canyon. Half-light is a wondrous term that implies…
West of Winnemucca The ride down Rt. 80 from Snyderville to Salt Lake City is always fun. It’s a regular roller coaster that drops 2,000 vertical feet. During the fifteen years I owned a place in Park City, I’m guessing I made that ride over 500 times. It’s a big wide highway that makes you want to go fast, but if you know the road like I do, you know that some prudence is suggested…
Without a Clue This process of exiting Ithaca is proving to be even more drawn out than I had previously imagined. I keep saying to myself that I have written my last story about closing down my 26-year home here and moving on, but something always seems to draw me back in. I sincerely hope this is the last of these stories, but I cannot promise that for certain. I have shipped seventeen boxes of…
Back at the Slopes Today was a relatively short driving day from Jackson to Park City. Kim and I got up at our normal roadtrip time of O’Dark Thirty. I did what I always do, which is write a story while staring up at the Grand Tetons. I had been instructed about how to get my own cereal, which I did, and once 8am rolled around, Kim and I decided that it might be best…
Being at Altitude Having owned a home in Park City, Utah for over fifteen years, I made it a point to get a familiar with the impact of altitude on the human body. I actually owned five different homes in Park CIty over those years for various and sundry reasons and they all ranged from being from 6,500 to 8,500 feet in altitude. That is the price of having a western ski house on the…