I thought having dogs in Manhattan would be problematic. We purposefully chose an apartment near Central Park for easy access to the trails and green spaces. We’ve been here for six weeks now, and let me assure you: there are plenty of dogs in the city. Thousands of dogs roam the park on any given day, many of them off-leash.
Our two fellas have never been the most cordial during interactions with other dogs. I recall a few instances of canine bedlam when meeting other dogs walking down a crowded dock from our boat. Yet here, the dogs we meet must give off a calming vibe. Our dogs rarely react to the most aggressive sniffing. It’s like they’re different dogs.
We often visit the same quiet section of the Park for our last walk in the evening. Except for the muffled sound of traffic, we might think we’re back on rural Vashon Island. Until we come around a bend and the sky opens up.
My breath usually catches at the sight, which feels like it must be computer-generated from some science fiction movie. A photo doesn’t capture it.
While the dogs pursue all the intricate scents on the ground, I am looking up and out. We are all living our best lives. What a city.
We’re in the middle of a cross-country car trip from Phoenix to New York City. We’re traveling with two dogs, which has put a serious crimp in our sightseeing options. We are living on truck stop coffee, fast food, and DoorDash in dog-friendly hotel rooms.
As we near Louisville, I know we have to visit the final resting place of Muhammad Ali in Cave Hill Cemetery. I met Ali when I was an aspiring teenage boxer and he was the heavyweight champion of the world. I’ll never forget that handshake and that famous smile. Or the courage he had to stand up for what he believed was right, no matter the personal cost.
The cemetery is beautiful. Lush, green, and quiet. The only sound is birdsong and the dripping of water from an earlier rain. It feels peaceful here. There are two benches for visitors to sit and reflect. His tombstone reads:
Service to others is the rent you pay for your room in heaven.
Rest in peace, Muhammad. You really were the Greatest.
We arrive in New York City in less than a week for our five-month adventure. Normally, we would fly from Phoenix, but because of the dogs, we must make the cross-country drive.
The idea behind this trip has been percolating for decades. When I retired, I wanted to travel and see the world, but not in a conventional way. I didn’t want to see ten countries in two weeks. That’s an exhausting vacation, not travel, and definitely not a pilgrimage. No. I wanted to immerse myself in a place as a local. Rent a furnished flat in Madrid for three months with just a Kindle, a traveler’s notebook, and a good pair of walking shoes.
The problem started with the Ford Expedition I rented for the drive. I chose a large vehicle because I wanted room for the dogs and anything we might bring. But now, as I survey the suitcases and eight loaded boxes of clothing and gear, I know I have forgotten my ideal of traveling light.
The boxes include a blender, two gaming consoles, a box of dog food, treats and toys, thirteen pairs of shoes, a super automatic coffee machine, a fancy electronic scale, fifty pounds of dumbbells, heavy coats, makeup, blankets, vitamins, rain shells, and a box of just computer gear.
Yet, I can’t name a single thing we should remove.
There's a psychological term for this. Stuff expands to the space allowed.
Next time, I’ll rent a Ford Fiesta.
P.S. - Follow my micro blog for more frequent updates on our adventures!
As we get set to start a new adventure in New York City, we’ve closed the chapter of our short RV life. We bought this Winnebago EKKO new and owned it for just under two years.
We explored some amazing places in the Southwest and beyond in its diminutive 23 feet. We visited many National Parks, including an unbelievable week at the Grand Canyon.
With the sale finalized, I ran the numbers that no boat or RV owner ever wants to see. We spent a total of 102 nights on this coach. Let’s just say we could have spent those nights at the nicest suite in the Seattle Four Seasons and still had money left over for breakfast.
We are sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park in the Flatiron District. Buildings encircle this urban oasis, framed by a blue New York sky. It is our last day in the city, and we have been walking all morning. Small dogs in fancy coats trot by us with their owners. The din of the city is somehow a comfort, like ocean surf. The temperature hovers around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, yet I feel warm in the sunlight, layered as I am in cold weather gear. Lisa sits beside me, taking it all in.
“Would you ever think of moving here permanently?” I ask. It’s a common question we pose when we travel.
“Oh, yeah,” she says without any hesitation. “I’ve always been a city girl.” Her face glows in the chilly air.
When we retired four years ago in our mid-50s, it seemed as if we had life by the tail. We sold the house and moved aboard our 43’ ocean-going trawler, set on exploring the world at a sedate six miles an hour. I’ve always loved the water, and getting this chance to cast off the bowlines was a lifelong dream. We built a home in Arizona in a 55+ retirement community as a mere precaution, a refuge from the soggy Pacific Northwest winters. Snowbirds, or maybe seagulls, might have better described us.
But a family tragedy dashed those plans. Crushed and grief-stricken, we sold the boat and stayed put in Arizona these past three years. We made friends and enjoyed the newness and comforts of a planned community that sprouted from nothing in the desert. Mostly, we worked on finding meaning in an unthinkable loss.
Over the past few months, Lisa and I started brainstorming ideas to escape the heat of these brutal Arizona summers. As someone who spent his entire life a half mile from the beach, I had no idea how scorching the desert during the height of summer could be.
These talks felt like a good sign. We were coming through it, maybe even out of it. Like Odysseus, we have traveled far. We have suffered. We have buried an oar in this place so far from the sea.
As we vetted possibilities, we knew we wanted challenge and variety, not vacation-style leisure. We needed a break from this predictable, curated life that attracts many to retirement communities.
But neither of us wanted the usual travel of flights and hotels and always being on the go. We could live out of a suitcase for a few weeks, but all summer? No. We did that during a family vacation to Europe. Forty-three stops in sixty days, including an attempt to see Paris in a weekend. Ugh. Never again.
As we pored over maps and searched travel sites, New York City kept popping up. I lived there for a year in the 1990s when Lisa and I first started dating. Neither of us could think of another U.S. city that had as much to offer a pair of healthy retirees with ample time on their hands. It would also mean a return to our very beginnings.
So, during an unseasonably warm Arizona January, we dug through our closets for winter clothes and flew to Manhattan. We walked all over the city, through Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Midtown, the Upper West and Upper East Sides, and Harlem. I heard stories that New York had changed for the worse, but in my eyes, the city was even more beautiful and clean than when I left it in 1995.
By the end of the week, we knew we had found our summer destination. We rented a furnished apartment on the Upper East Side from mid-May through mid-October. The brownstone is a half block from Central Park and not far from the five-story walk-up I rented many years ago.
We’ll have all the time we need to explore the city at our leisure, not as tourists, but as starry-eyed transplants. I’ll take writing classes. Lisa will paint. We’ll join a gym. We’ll walk the dogs twice a day through Central Park. I’ll make friends with the docents at the Met, a place I stumbled through in a daze during my only visit, but now I can study methodically.
Figuring out how to live in New York City — where to shop for groceries and how to get around on the subways — is the type of travel that, in time, will change us forever. Paris, to me now, is an irritating blur. After five months of daily life, New York will be woven into our DNA. We will always have it.
Yes, it’s a costly trip. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and we splurged on a deluxe apartment. We wanted the best possible experience for this new mode of immersive travel, which might be something we repeat each summer.
“I can’t believe we rented an apartment,” Lisa says, touching my gloved hand.
“We’re doing this,” I agree.
What is this stirring I feel in my chest? Is it hope? This must be what sunrise feels to the hiker lost deep in the woods. We resume our walk, looking around as if we own the place.
I’ve seen so many beautiful postcards and photos of Crater Lake over my life. None of them, including this one I took today from the crater’s edge, capture the true beauty of this place. Yowza.
We’re one week into a six-week circuit from Arizona through Nevada and Oregon to Washington State, then down the coast through Oregon and California. We’re staying primarily in National Parks in our little self-contained RV, but we’re not rushing: three days at each stop. We’re at 6,000 feet elevation here at Crater Lake, but my lungs seem to fill more completely as I walk through these ancient woods. We’ve been in the Southwest now for over two years, and I didn’t realize how much I missed the trees, and streams and green of the Northwest. I’ve traveled a lot, but almost all of it was point A to point B: airports, conference rooms, dinners, homogenous hotel rooms, and jet lag. Did I really see all those cities?
Going slow, stopping often. This is the way to travel.
Camped along the Colorado River here at Davis Camp on the Arizona-Nevada border. Smaller rigs can nose right up to the edge of the river. This is my kind of camping.
Getting some culture today at the Phoenix Art Museum. Since moving to the area last December, we try to see something new each week on what we call our Adventure Thursdays (and eat: lunch at Welcome Diner was delicious).
Any Phoenicians here with recommendations on places we should visit?
The English word lost derives from the Old Norse los, which refers to the disbanding of an army. This etymology implies that losing one’s way is less about being in the wrong place than it is about letting go of planned endeavors, and embracing surprises rather than avoiding them.
I’ve wanted to see the Grand Canyon for as long I could remember. I think it was a Brady Bunch episode from the early 70s that first caught my imagination. They described the canyon as mountains lying down. Last week, we drove up from Phoenix and camped on the South Rim. We took our electric bicycles from Mather Campground to ride Hermit’s End. Even with such high expectations, I was floored by what I saw. We took the entire day to ride eight miles. We stopped and stared for long stretches. What a wonder. 🗺️
Grieving the loss of a child is a journey through wastelands you never expected to cross. Unlike every other challenge you’ve ever faced, there is no easy way through a loss like this. You stumble and fall. You curse. You are hobbled and bloody. You are not sure of the way. You might be going in circles.
The truth is everyone suffers in this life. It’s our lot to take the awful with the beautiful. We all must face it. In a perfect world, your mom wouldn’t forget you in the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. You wouldn’t lose a dear friend to cancer in the prime of her life. Your son wouldn’t die in a motorcycle accident before his twenty-first birthday.
In the months before we lost Connor, we crossed a high wire of reinvention. We retired from our careers. We sold our long-time family home and said goodbye to a lifetime of friends on Vashon Island. We bought a winter home in Arizona with the half-sane plan of living a life split between the summer sea and the winter desert. For half the year, home was where we'd drop the anchor.
Reinvention might come easier for some. I felt like a reluctant hermit crab who knows he must shift to a new shell to survive but dreads the transfer. The plans were years in the making. And just at that vulnerable juncture between one shell and the other, that final letting go of the safety and security of the familiar for the heady promise of a new life, a tsunami upends everything, stranding this naked, scared crab, its tiny claws raised as if to fight the wind and water and waves.
And yet, life continues. We settled into the new house in Arizona. Little bursts of joy came from unexpected sources: the convenience of curbside trash and recycling, reliable high-speed internet, and kind, welcoming neighbors. I unpacked the sixty boxes of books that make up my library, caressing each volume, inhaling its scent, remembering its message as I slowly rebuilt my sanctuary, my illusive shell.
A Sanctuary of Books
Reading has always been a solace. I read a lot of history and philosophy these past months: the marvels of early Egypt and the brutality of Ancient Rome in Will Durant’s grand opus, The Story of Civilization; the millions of years of Earth’s geology poetically taught in Basin and Range by John McPhee; and the insignificance of our human existence in a careening, infinite universe in Probable Impossibilities by Alan Lightman. Taking a dispassionate view can ease the sting of personal loss.
We sold MV Indiscretion this spring, saying goodbye to trawler life and our ties to the Pacific Northwest. I have let go of so many layers of my identity — business professional, islander, sailor, son to my parents, and now father to my son — that it felt right to reach back to utter beginnings, where I might remake myself, like Gandalf after his plunge from the Bridge of Moria.
We bought a small off-road capable RV in April and have taken a few trips to explore the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. In June, we crossed into Mexico to camp on the shores of the Sea of Cortez. These months in the desert were the longest I’ve strayed from the ocean in my entire life. I missed the smell of the sea and the feel of dried salt on my skin. We waded in the warm surf, feeling once again that indescribable joy of shifting sand under our heels and between our toes while flocks of pelicans dove for their dinner a few yards from us.
I sat beside tide pools nestled within the rocky outcrops that lay between long stretches of sand: hermit crabs battling to defend their territories, starfish, sea stars, sea slugs, mussels, sea urchins, and tiny brine shrimp, all pursuing the minutiae of their daily lives. Looking up into the cosmos and down into a tide pool, I noted the parallels: we are all one.
A strong south wind picked up one night, and gusts gently rocked the RV on its suspension. I emerged from a heavy sleep to check the anchor, trying to remember how far we were from the rocks on shore. I drifted back to sleep, still dreaming we were afloat. I know the sea beckons on the far side of this wilderness.
Camping on the Sea of Cortez
After a long period of intentional isolation, I have begun the process of reconnecting with old friends and making new friends here in Arizona. This has been difficult for me. They ask me how I’m doing. Am I OK? I don’t have an answer. “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step,” said Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Every day, I take a step.
I’m writing this tonight from a small campground in southern Colorado. We’ve been traveling for a few weeks, taking the backroads, stopping often, seeing where the open road takes us. We have no plan, no definite time to return. It feels good to roam.
Driving through western New Mexico, I felt a lightness I didn’t expect. The beauty of the colorful mesas and buttes rising around us filled me with awe. We hiked to La Ventana Natural Arch to find ourselves in an ancient, sacred place — a place of prayer and hope and resilience. It left me wanting to see more, to do more. For the first time in many months, my mind tilted forward, a blessed release from so much focus on the past.
La Ventana Natural Arch in New Mexico
Every day brings a little more joy and a little less sadness. On good days, I see a brightening just over the horizon. A clearing? Yet there are still those days when I sink deep into sorrow and recognize the false dawn. There is no way around this, only forward, across this barren terrain. One step. Then another. When I dare look around, I see so many others walking beside me. Grief is the price we all pay for love. Won’t you take my hand? It won’t be long now. If death has taught me anything, it's that nothing persists, not even grief.
As I walked through the throng of travelers at LAX recently on my way to a flight that would be canceled the minute I got to the gate, I reflected on how change is the only real constant in life. In less than a week, I found myself hurrying through crowded airports in Seattle, Denver and Los Angeles (fun fact: these three airports accounted for 60% of all holiday flight cancelations). From Denver, I drove 1,200 miles to Los Angeles in a Jeep with Connor and his ten-month-old puppy, listening to baseball podcasts (yes, that's a thing) through Colorado and New Mexico. The music changed to hip hop in Arizona, and I felt nostalgic for the podcasts. I paid nearly $7 per gallon for gas in California and felt nostalgic for Arizona. We survived freeway driving in the rain as we neared Los Angeles with Connor relying on his 19-year-old reflexes -- or the Force -- to weave in and out of 80-mph traffic.
Mallory hosted us at her beautiful apartment near Santa Monica. She's only lived there a few months but showed us around her bustling neighborhood like a native. I can't believe this young lady who grew up on an island of 10,000 is now so at ease in a city of four million. We picked up Lisa at LAX later that night in a downpour. And defying the promise of the song and our much-needed dose of Vitamin D, It really does rain in Southern California. Serious drenching rain, like the kind I used to see in the rain forest near Forks.
With the four of us together, we did the usual holiday stuff, but in a new way: last-minute Christmas shopping at an open-air mall in the pouring rain, Christmas Eve ramen, a marathon Monopoly game made longer by Lisa's insistence on gifting money to her children and thereby violating the very premise of the game (!), a requisite walk through Marina del Rey to gawk at boats, and Christmas Day with extended family in Costa Mesa. Here I got to meet the next generation of little ones -- Jackson, Avery and Effie -- and as I helped them play with their Christmas toys, I couldn't shake the feeling that time had somehow looped back on itself, and I was a new dad, and Mallory and Connor were little again, and that life stood still.
For many years, our holidays repeated a predictable pattern at our island home. The same setting, the same meals, the same corner with the same kind of Christmas tree, the same wintry night on the same porch, looking out at the night sky and sea. Yet, life is forever changing, renewing, and reshaping. As Alan Watts said, "the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." Long-standing traditions can be a comfort, but on this family holiday, with its unexpected detours and moments of sheer bliss, I learned a new kind of music. And it's time to dance.
We said goodbye to this young man this morning and have started our drive back home - 1,400 miles away. Every parent must face this, but holy smokes this was hard. Felt like a punch in the gut to walk out of that dorm room. It’s a new chapter for all of us and I know I should be excited, but I’m going to need these miles ahead to wrap my brain and heart around all this. But, you know what? Connor is going to absolutely kill it here. So proud.
I spent last weekend in Las Vegas to attend my niece’s Little White Chapel wedding on the Strip. Frequent flier miles paid for our tickets, placing us in the far back of the plane. On the way home to Seattle, my family took the whole row on the port side of the aircraft, while I settled into the opposite aisle seat. A couple soon appeared and clambered into the seats next to mine. They had flown down for the weekend to see Billy Idol perform and were on their way back home.
I felt my seat grow a little smaller as I wedged my body and gear inside the proper confines of my aisle seat. I’ve flown in a lot of middle seats in my life. Those armrests go with the seat-bearer. Trust me on that.
The woman, dressed in sensible travel clothes, sat in the window seat and soon busied herself with a book. Her companion, fitted out in trim, athletic apparel, was personable enough upon introduction, but soon fell silent, back straight, eyes open and staring forward. Unmoving.
Before every plane trip, I make sure I bring along enough distractions to keep me occupied for the duration of the nerve-rattling tin can captivity of air travel. While I’ve flown nearly a million miles over my life, most of it shuttling between airports and corporate conference rooms, I still maintain an unshakable dread of flying. I’ve woken from nightmares of being stuck in the middle seat of a plane with nothing to read. Seriously.
In the old days, to take my mind off the jolts of turbulence, I weighted down my bag with two or three books and a couple newspapers, along with an ample supply of work projects. For this particular trip, I brought my Kindle with a newly begun 1,000-page novel, an iPad loaded with the day’s Wall Street Journal, a movie and a few episodes of a TV show I’m following, and an iPhone with 300 hours of music and a slew of games. Pair all this with noise-canceling headphones, and I carried more entertainment gear than the tiny seat back pocket could accommodate — my electronically-insulated cocoon.
While the man beside me continued his meditative trance, bugging the shit out of me, I considered my obsession with keeping busy on planes. I try to meditate every day, but I cannot imagine a two and a half hour meditation while hurtling along at 34,000 feet in intermittent turbulence. Taking a car ferry every day like I do is far more dangerous than flying, based on the data. Yet I need something at hand to occupy my mind in any confined space, especially a multi-hour strapped-in plane ride.
I thought this fellow, in his enthusiasm for seeing Billy Idol, must have forgotten to bring along reading material. You know, rushing out the door with your bags and tickets, excited for the bright lights of Vegas and to see a beloved entertainer. This can be forgiven. I think. But wait. The Airline Magazine was resting at eye level in the seat-back 11 inches from his direct line of sight. Did he ever flip through it, even as a diversion? No, he did not.
My air travel anxiety began even before I made that walk down the gangway to board my first flight. When I was seven, my mom shared a story with me about a strange feeling she had at the gate before boarding a plane to Guam when she was in her early twenties. At the last minute, she followed her instincts and decided not to board. The plane crashed with all passengers lost somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A horrifying event. Looking back now, I don’t think this actually happened to my mom. I think she made the whole thing up after reading about something similar in the National Enquirer or watching a TV show on ESP. I can’t ask her now, but even if it wasn’t true, it instilled a healthy fear of flying in me at an impressionable age.
Then, in my teens during my short-lived boxing career, Chuck Robinson, a 17-year-old welterweight, two years my senior, made it on the Muhammad Ali Boxing Team all the way from our little small-town Washington state boxing program. He got to spar with the great one himself at Ali’s gym in Santa Monica. Chuck was an exceptional athlete, and to me and many others, a real local hero. He and 13 other amateur boxers flew to Europe in the Spring of 1980 to compete in the qualifiers for the 1980 Olympics - a dream of mine and near reality for Chuck. Somewhere over Warsaw, the aircraft suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure and spiraled out of control for 26 seconds before crashing. The muscles and tendons between wrist and forearm of most of the athletes were severed on impact, suggesting these young men were awake and gripping their seats at the time of the crash. The plane disintegrated as it plowed into the ground, killing all 87 aboard.
Wreckage of LOT Polish Airlines Flight 7
I think about Chuck and that awful half-minute of terror every time I fly.
As I considered my seatmate, I realize the two of us must exist on separate ends of a personality spectrum. Me, with with my gadgets sprawled on my lap as we taxied down the runway, intent on distracting myself from the potential of immediate demise; he, with his zen-like serenity, oblivious to the unnatural motion and angle as we made our ascent to the heavens, only to plummet to our deaths should one of a hundred possible mechanical failures present itself.
When the drink cart rolled through after a rough bit of turbulence, I ordered a beer, maybe my last, I reasoned. He took only water.
Near the end of the flight, I stole a glance his way, sure to find him asleep, perhaps a spot of drool pooled on his fitted microfiber shirt. But no, I saw his eyes were open and intently focused .... on nothing. I turned away, abashed. A part of me wanted to be like him, to be relaxed and calm, to be present, even during this suspended limbo of plane travel, maybe crafting a beautiful sonnet or the perfect line of code as he stared at the seat back ahead of him. Yet, at that moment I found myself hating him. His smugness and self-assuredness. His straight spine and posture. His stillness.
After the plane landed safely and people began the slow disembarkment ahead of us, we exchanged pleasantries. Welcome home, I said. You too, he said. That must have been some show, I said. He and his companion smiled and nodded. I helped take down their bags from the overhead compartment.
While we waited our turn to leave the plane, I wondered again at my nervousness of air travel. Do I need all these distractions underway, or am I obscuring an opportunity at more profound personal enlightenment to fully experience the present moment and embrace the wonderful but temporary life we have been given? Maybe this man has the right of it.
I looked around and found entire rows of people with their heads pointed down, intent on their tiny screens, catching up on what they had missed in our three-hour sojourn from tarmac to tarmac. The siren song of voicemail and text message pings filled the stale air of the plane all around me like the sounds of a pinball machine. I was not alone in this constant need for distraction.
As I followed my seatmate and his companion up the aisle, I vowed to myself: next time, I will face down my demons and experience the joy and terror of the moment even as we careen and jostle through the skies above.
Writing this from the Alaska Airlines Boardroom as I await my flight to San Francisco, I have already broken that promise. I would save a child from a burning building, but I won’t board a plane without a well-stocked iPad.
In my acceptance of these shortcomings, I tip my hat to the well-found soul in seat 34B.
When I was a boy, younger than twelve-year-old Connor is now, I believed all the stories my dear Pop told me. He sailed across oceans, traveled down the Nile, jumped out of planes in the 82nd Airborne, drank with Hemingway, conspired with Castro, along with many other misdeeds and adventures. While my kids are constant skeptics of any tales I tell, even the true ones, I didn’t question the stories I was told. Pop was a great story teller. He would get this gleam in his eye while he drew you in and threw in such vivid details of the surroundings and the things that happened to him that you couldn’t help but believe.
One of Pop’s favorite tales was about his time in Valencia, Spain. I don’t recall why he was there. Maybe the army? It didn’t matter. All I knew is he loved Valencia. Its beaches, women, wine and music. Its history and machismo and bullfighting. This was captivating stuff for a ten year old.
He liked to whistle and sing the Valencia song, originally done by Jose Padilla in the 1920s, but made popular again in 1950 by crooner Tony Martin when my Pop was himself a young man. He whistled this song most every morning as he started his day. I would find myself whistling and singing it too through my early teens until our tastes in music diverged for thirty or so years. I smile as I see this happening with Connor now as he sings Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds when he’s in the shower or making himself a sandwich. Or finding old Bruce Springsteen songs on Mallory’s iTunes playlists.
So, when we were planning our trip to Spain, I knew we had to visit Valencia.
In the car as we approached the city, I found myself whistling the song, just like Pop did so many years ago, to the dismay of the kids. “What’s up with Dad? Why is he grinning like that? And what is that horrible song he’s trying to whistle?!” Even Lisa grew concerned, and she knows the back story.
We spent two days here in Valencia and Pop was right to admire the city. In contrast to the crowds of Barcelona, this place is tranquil, even languid. The charm and authenticity of the old quarter is refreshing compared to the more tourist-minded areas of some of the other parts of Spain we’ve visited.
And it’s warmer here. Today it was nearly 90 degrees. The wine is good and the women are indeed very beautiful. Lisa and Mallory have hinted that the men here aren’t bad looking either. Connor is non-committal, though he turned beet red when I asked him what he thought of seeing so many topless sunbathers at the beach.
We rented bicycles and explored the old part of town, the many tree-lined parks, the new science and technology center, the port with its Americas Cup headquarters, and the beach. The water is warm and the sand is perfect. I’m writing this while the rest of the family dozes on beach chairs under an umbrella. The sea beckons with a half-dozen white sails dotting the blue horizon, making me wish I were out there sailing on a broad reach, feeling the angle of the warm wind on my cheek.
And as I take in the beauty of this place, I wonder if Pop ever came here himself, or if his Valencia was just another of his tall tales. I could ask him, but most of me doesn’t really want to know. I’d like to believe he walked these streets as I did today and breathed in this orange-scented air; that he left some part of himself here long ago, a strand or two woven into the fabric of this beautiful place.
I wonder if any of my own tales have found purchase with my kids, strong enough that they might some day go out and experience it for themselves, to see what their crazy old Pop was always going on about …. maybe sailing off to a remote Caribbean island, singing three little birds with big dreamy grins, every sight and sound and smell unlocking childhood memories long tucked away, relishing the swell of the sea under their feet.
A nice thought. Maybe this is how dreams are meant to pass down the line after all.
Wreckage of LOT Polish Airlines Flight 7
