Author: Bev

Our lives are an accumulation of a variety of moments.  I think the cliché is that we all experience the good, the bad, and the ugly.  A few of our moments are unpleasant or downright traumatic, but we’ve lived through them.

Because of a dream, I thought about one of those unpleasant moments in my life and a light switched on.  If it weren’t for that moment that I often wished I hadn’t experienced, I wouldn’t be here where I am now with all of the awesome goodness that followed “then.”

That moment that I’d rather not relive, turned out to be a necessary piece of the fabric that God has used to knit together my life.  Without that particular and specific cog in the wheel, I would never have been catapulted to this place, space, and circumstances, nor developed the character that most of us would identify as personality.

Remember the old adage that bad things happen to good people?  This is one of the inexplicable facts of life.  Its opposite, good things happen to bad people, is also an observable fact.

Trying to figure out why these things are so is a futile exercise.  The result of the exercise would be a banging your head against a wall moment.

I came to a theological conclusion many years ago, based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:5, that God sends sun as well as rain to both good and bad people, alike.  Similarly, Peter (I Peter 5:9) says that our fellow human beings all over the world undergo the same sufferings.

I surmise that in order to come to a place of satisfaction with one’s moments in life, either good or bad, we must endure some measure of suffering, or pain.  I base this theory on the evolution of the word satisfaction, which can be understood as the performance of penance.

In other words, we pay a price for life-satisfaction.  Having experienced what we feel is enough pain, and the cost starts to feel too high, most of us plow forward to reap the rewards of a life well-and-truly lived.

But, in the meantime, there is waiting.  During the waiting or the time of paying penance, we usually encounter moments of pretending that what we’ve experienced was enough, already.

Do you remember marking time with the marching band?  It’s necessary for getting the rhythm right before taking off down the street.

Rock songs occasionally mark time with the traditional one, two, three, four, sometimes accompanied by the solid click of drum sticks.  Then, you’ve learned, the other instruments will take it away, starting the tune that you’re now widely anticipating.

Most of us do a sort of percussive marking time while waiting in line, or waiting for anything.  Old timers called it fidgeting.

It can be a tap of the toe, drumming your fingers on a table or grocery cart handles.  It can be the more obvious shifting of your body weight from one leg to the other, a little heavier and clunkier than the usual dance.  But it’s a dance nonetheless, a noticeable dance of waiting.

There are so many lines, the British call them queues, to wait in these days.  I don’t know if there are more today than yesteryear or if people are more impatient or if I’m just noticing more impatience.

Some folks dance with their fingers; the keyboard of their phone, their accompaniment.  It’s not as solitary an action as one might think.  “Dance with Me” by Orleans and Abba’s “Dancing Queen” come to mind for some reason.

Obviously, these are empirical observations, an anecdotal story, not the heavily scientific kind of fact.  However, I invite you to replicate my statements by observing people the next time you find yourself in line somewhere. 

You’ll see.  There is a rhythm to our moments.

 

“The pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.” Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel, A Room with a View, was on a grand tour of Europe, acquiring an informal education expected for her time and social class.

I wasn’t looking to be educated, but like Lucy Honeychurch, I serendipitously found happiness through travel to Europe.  But in this column, I hope to address the intersect between inner travel from home, and boots on the ground travel.  If your destination is happiness, they’re the same.

I expected to love Italy and her gregarious people and awesome food.  Can you say Parmesan and Asiago?  But the countryside was meh.

Equally, I was prepared to abhor France with what I thought would be snooty people, runny cheeses and sauce-saturated food.  I even expected to feel frumpy in the presence of French women.

But not so much.  I mostly got away with properly enunciating the French niceties I had memorized, even after my failed attempt at college-French.  And the French women didn’t take a second look.

There are all kinds of travelers.  I think most people travel with a plan – at most, they have an agenda or itinerary, and at least, a guidebook.

Other people, there are probably fewer of us, travel not so much with a plan, but an outline that usually ends up buried at the bottom of our bags and we just drive, stopping where we feel like stopping.  More often than not, the places that strike us at the moment, end up being our most eventful experiences.  Sometimes, not; but those are the fabric of travel tales.

I’ve said it before, “the best things in life just happen.” This is one of those things I’ve observed again and again to be true and unshakable, a concept that could not be better experienced than in my travels.

Years ago, my husband and I visited a number of U.S. cities, and several restaurants in them.  We had some truly memorable dining experiences at places that we happened upon.  Only later were some of them enshrined by means of media such as the New York Times.  We thought we discovered them – Christopher Columbus, were we. 

The best steak I’ve ever consumed was at the Pecan Street Café in Austin, Texas.  The best steak and cheese sandwich was in the convention center in Columbus, Ohio (sorry Philadelphia).  The best seafood-ish platter, including my first frog’s legs, way too obviously the real thing, on a plate, was in New Orleans at Mulates the Original Cajun Restaurant.  Lastly, in this slew of bests was the best bagel I’ve ever eaten, from a storefront in Albany, New York.

My unusual point here is that the first unplanned, magical dining moment when we discovered a place, could not be repeated.  Celebration by the media deteriorated the restaurants and diminished the allure of our returning more than once.

Back to Europe, I was surprisingly warm to rural France as well as the Paris neighborhood where we stayed a few days.  The round-abouts grew familiar and less scary to navigate the countryside.  I marveled at lace curtains in otherwise, humble stone garages through village after village.

One highlight of our trip was Arles, France, the site of a favorite movie, Ronan.  The old, worn cobbled streets around the ancient Roman coliseum, and the ruins themselves, made me feel fulfilled in the way described by Oliver Goldsmith in his 1764 poem, The Traveler: “Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms.”  In France, go figure.

Also, in Arles, my husband and I sat at a table in a courtyard just under some dying jasmine still strikingly fragrant.  A lizard crawled casually around the stone-encased, arched doorway leading to our hotel room.  Below a Juliet balcony, we hadn’t planned to eavesdrop on the faint voices of the guests inside the open window.

A couple of exceptions to my preference for France after having visited the continent, were in Italy.  In Lucca, we rode bikes – a skill I hadn’t exercised since childhood, all around the walled city.  We weaved through a street performance of a Puccini aria in celebration of his birth in the city, dodging the smell of freshly cured ham potently streaming from a shop.  Our bike route took us along a canal near our hotel, to a nearby botanical garden where we delighted in turtles and trees.

My husband lived for a number of years in Verona.  We visited the apartment building where he lived, and saw the shopkeepers window he accidentally broke.  I couldn’t believe the streets, home to Hermes, Louboutin, Versace, Givenchy…, just off the square at the famed coliseum, were constructed of huge street-sized slabs of marble tied together in a parquet pattern – the street, mind you.

Before leaving for that trip, I said, “no churches filled with brutal Renaissance art.”  However, several churches, and a couple of castles we visited, made me want to go back ASAP.  I also delighted in every piece of art we happened upon.  So much for “best-laid plans” and “famous last words.” 

A line from Elizabeth Bishop’s 1956 poem, Questions of Travel, speaks to an important query; “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?”  Actually, I had stayed at home and thought of Europe, pondering if my ancestral homeland was somehow “home.”

For decades before traveling there, I watched movies, documentaries and travel shows set in Europe, studied European culture, cooked European food, and pictured myself wandering Europe.  Then, I went.  The compulsion to go back doesn’t leave me while I continue to read, and think of “there.”

I read somewhere a paradox that we can simultaneously be both a masterpiece and a work in progress.  Maybe one day, home and travel will converge. “Let it go.  Let it out.  Let it all unravel.  Let it free and it can be.  A path on which to travel.” -Michael Leunig

I’m no poet but don’t you know it; not a stanza extravaganza nor alliteration configuration.  But my thoughts ought naught be canceled.  Erased or disgraced….

I wish to cancel you.  Cancel who?

Cancel you!  Cancel culture?

Who are you?  Cancel-culture-vulture.

Offends me.  Or sends me.

Cancel reading.  Cancel seeding.

Hit the ceiling.  Hurt my feelings.

Cancel dinner.  Cancel lunch.

Next cancel breakfast.  I have a hunch.

Lash out.  Cash you out.

Cancel smart.  Cancel heart.

Freak out.  Speak out.

Been canceled.  Been banned.

Unfriended.  Befriended.

Don’t like history.  It feels wrong.

It should be better.  Could be better.

Cancel learning.  Cancel yearning.

Cancel potato.  Cancel fun.

Cancel kindness.  Cancel hope.

Cancel left.  Cancel right.

They piddle on the middle.  We wait not hate.

Sun rise.  Cancel compromise.

Powerful-cancel.  Elite-control.

Cancel thought.  Cancel reason.  Who can please ’em?

Cancel gender.  With agenda.

Cancel monuments.  Cancel history.

Cancel love.  And the One above.

Cancel freedom.  Cancel speech.

Cancel prayer.  Cancel care.

Cancel-hoards.  Cancel-words.

I don’t like you.  Cancel you.

I don’t know you.  Cancel who?

 

One does not have to be a food expert in order to engage in culinary travels.  Most travel makes food procurement mandatory.  Some of it is nothing to write home about.

Travel food, one of the highlights of the adventure, tends to define a place for the foreign traveler, in particular.  Foreign food is rife with cultural misinterpretation, and subjective taste. 

Some of my food expectations when traveling have made the experience bewildering. For example, when in France, I thought we should eat “French food.”

The best food we ate in Paris was, oiled and seasoned haricot-verte (stick-thin, whole green beans) from an Italian deli. I still regret sticking to my preconceived notions about foreign dining, when we could have probably enjoyed an awesome meal in the Italian restaurant below that deli in Paris.

We found an inexpensive German-made chocolate bar while meandering through a Parisian neighborhood grocery; wishing later that we had bought several.  This compares sadly to the little box of overpriced Belgian chocolates from a specialty shop in, yes, Belgium, that had the same icky mystery filling of any old U.S. boxed chocolates.

In Finale Liguria, Italy, where my Italian was understood with a Canadian accent, the strawberry gelato from a beach-side shop, was so delectable that I quickly learned the correct enunciation, gelato alla fregola, to get it again behind a long line of other quick learners.  This contrasts with the truly boring pasta in Verona, Italy that I could have made better at home.

Both a language issue and a revelation about my husband, was the tuna pizza at a hotel restaurant in northern Italy.  I was too weary to consult the phrase book for our pizza selection so we winged-it.  It was Italy, it was pizza, what’s to screw up?

When you’re thinking pizza toppings, does tonno sound to you like it might translate to tomatoes?  To this overtired brain, it did.  Well, it doesn’t mean tomatoes, it means tuna.  Who puts tuna on pizza?

The look on my husband’s face when our tuna pizza arrived was priceless.  Understand that this man is known for trying almost any food.

His response was something like the full-body-spasm that precedes throwing up, rising from the stomach, through the diaphragm, the esophagus and into the facial muscles.  I’d never seen this reaction to food in decades of marriage to this man.  In all fairness, our cats probably would have walked away from that pizza.

The next food-like and language observation was along the autobahn in Germany.  I’m not a potty-joke kind of person, but this one has to be told.

We’re comfortable with the romance languages, rooted in Latin (French, Spanish, Italian), but German is way out of our comfort zone.  Highway signs in particular were difficult for us to comprehend, especially because they came too fast for this navigator to grab the phrase book and translate.  But, one German highway word that we will never forget is, Ausfahrt, which means exit.  We snort-laughed for miles at that one.

Language mistakes have to constitute some of the funniest mistakes a person can make.  Add a language mistake to a travel-weary-food conundrum and you might just have a stand-up comedy routine. 

This brings me to the Mantisse, a chocolate-filled muffin that we discovered in McDonald’s restaurants throughout France.  I fell in love with these things.  So, as we pulled up to a drive thru, our daughter asked her dad to order her favorite, crepes and I from the back seat this time, asked for a Mantisse.  It must have been one of our tired moments, because both of them swore I ordered, “mymanJesus.” 

I realize that it is a personal preference, and many of you will have your own, but we liked nary a restaurant meal that we tried in Europe.  Particularly disappointing was the grisly, chewy mystery meat special of the day that we tried at a road-side, mom-and-pop’s type restaurant, packed with regulars, in rural France.  The gravy/sauce though was wonderfully, stereotypically French.  Similarly, my Parisian plate of runny cheese sauce that was supposed to be shrimp ravioli, tasted like nothing, watered-down, and cost eight euros.

But the autobahn ham sandwiches, jambon-beurre, were perfection, as well as almost every market, deli, or food-truck, a la carte items we lived on (baguettes, cheese, pain au chocolat, grapes, etc.).  Middle-Eastern walk-ups of kabobs and gyros became a favorite destination from within small walled cities to mid-size towns, throughout the continent.  They also provided much coveted “French fries” to our daughter, under the English moniker, chips.  FYI potato chips in Europe, are crisps.

We periodically bought a case of bottled water at big grocery stores and kept it in our car trunk (boot, in our English, steering wheel on the right, rental).  But do you think we could get a bottle of “fizzy” water, gazeuse, in a French restaurant?  Later, we learned to ask for the most common brand name, Perrier.

Aboard the QEII and Queen Mary, we avoided our scheduled, formal meals, for which one had to dress formally.  We tried it once and the food was okay but not our cup of tea, get it, cup of tea, English formality….

However, the afternoon teas, complete with scones, cucumber sandwiches, etc., were nice enough; the chocolate chip cookies at the buffets were addictive; the Fish n Chips at the pub was everything the English tradition touts; and every buffet was true to its delicious stereotype, making thrice-daily walks on deck mandatory.

Finally, I will end this discussion of food and foreign travel with a cautionary tale.  Go prepared with your own over-the-counter remedies, such as Pepto-Bismol, Tylenol, antacids, etc.  There are green-crossed signs easily identifying pharmacies in every city in Western Europe but I dare you to find an over-the-counter item in there.  Nor are these items available in neighborhood groceries, or in what we know as dollar stores.

Bon voyage and bon apetit.    

The Lie of the Easy Access Phone Card, is my next tale of misadventure.  This one is a twofer.  It happened not once, but twice.  First, it was in the very same German destination as the Baden Baden ham experience from Memories of Travel.

This was 2008, before the ease of using cell phones between foreign countries and home had evolved.  We were told by travel experts at the time that the best way to phone home was to purchase a phone card at any neighborhood Tabac (Tobacco shop).

This is what we had done, in France on our way to Germany.  My husband thought he plugged in all the right numbers and codes to use the card from our nice German hotel.  So, he called his mom to chat about some highlights of the trip so far, for about twenty minutes.

The shock didn’t come until the next morning when I, alone, stood in front of a very stern, slim, dark-haired, middle-aged woman, demanding that I pay the phone charge of more than one hundred euros, which had been attached to our room bill of around two hundred euros.  My daughter and husband had gone to retrieve the car from the parking garage, so I stood alone in protest – “we used a phone card for that call,” to a solid response of – “that doesn’t work in Germany.”

“Okay,” this traveler nearly cried, as she shelled out more than three-hundred euros for that little misadventure.

This incident was followed a few days later by The Tale of the Norman Bates Hotel/Prison Scandal, which ended our attempts to call home using phone cards.  It was in France this time so we thought we’d emerge unscathed.  Not so much, but in a surprising caper.

We were tired and again, hungry.  We filled the car with gas and had to find a hotel soon.  It wasn’t rural and it wasn’t urban; maybe suburban industrialish would best describe the area.  We finally found a small, ranch style, U.S.-type homegrown motel.

It wasn’t great but it would do.  I think we picked up some food after getting gas, because we sat at picnic tables and ate outside the front valet area of the mostly deserted motel.  A few biker-type guests arrived and also meandered around outdoors.

Once more or less settled into our room, I had – after some struggle to get internet access, paid a bill via my laptop, and we planned to use our phone card at a pay phone in the hallway.  It took all three of us to figure out how to place that call to our friend who was manning our business and household affairs.

Lo and behold, we had locked ourselves out of our room.  I went to the front desk to beg for help and came upon the male manager, locking a metal grid across the desk area preparing to leave for the night.  What?

First, he yelled at me in and out of French, but reluctantly got us back into our room.  “Stupid Americans,” mumble mumble.  Second, we were essentially being locked into this hotel property with nobody remaining on sight from management.  Again, what?

There was a “back” door to the outside of our room and we stepped out, making sure we could get back in, to come and go to our car for bottled water and fruit, when we saw a gate had been closed to the property.  Twilight Zone music began to play in our heads – loudly.  I think we all jumped into bed and pulled the covers over our heads to quell the creepiness, at least until restless sleep took over.

Last in this series of tales is, The Tale of Your Teenage Daughter Hates You.  If you require reference material for this story, I will suggest two movies: 3 Days to Kill and European Vacation.

We thought it would be an epic coming of age, pre-graduation gift to our seventeen-year-old daughter, taking her to Europe.  Do you know the phrase, “it was the thought that counts?”  But now, many years down the road, the whole thing counts as a redacted, edited, and revisionist historical blessing to said daughter.

This tale is shared by way of teenager-daughter-dialogue which is not intended to elicit a response from her parents.  I think this is known as rhetorical speech.

“They have no internet service;” and the related, “I can’t get this dumb code to work.”

“I want French fries;” This is France, how hard could it be to find French fries in France?

“I have to pee;” “You want me to pee where?”  “You know that is a hole in the ground, not a                 restroom and there’s a man peeing against the wall in there?” and “Where do you put the toilet paper?”

“No!  I really mean it, NO!” – repeat – repeat – repeat….

Said teenager’s resounding no in Europe has become a yes in the telling of her own travel tales. “That was the worst meal, your spanakopita is better…, dad would have loved the feta with every meal….”

Staying inside her body like chickenpox, she had unknowingly caught the flu-like travel bug while still gestating in the womb, and it flares up periodically.  Her husband caught the bug from her, “when we were in Athens…, the beer in Germany….”

So, even the most negative of travel experiences imprint on one’s memories as life-enhancing travel tales. 

 

 

William Shakespeare’s “now is the winter of our discontent,” seems somehow appropriate today as I feel a smidgen trapped inside an igloo.  From in here to out there I see ice, snow, and restriction.

Last year’s travel restrictions continue and our forced hibernation is making me a tad nostalgic. So, in the next few columns, I’m going a travelin’. 

I think the expansive quality of travel memories – to make negative experiences into positively amusing stories – defines travel.  Travel experiences invite embellishment and detail, just like big-fish stories, I suppose.

Our travel memories are a part of our developing life story.  We become the person of those tales.  And, maybe that person is not who we expected to be, because we traveled.

What does travel do for the people who engage in it?  Why bother?

I extemporaneously testified at my brother-in-law’s memorial service, to the joyful fact that his marrying my sister not only extended our family but expanded my worldview beyond my country of birth to his country, Canada.  “He changed my life by exposing a green, young girl from rural Pennsylvania to another whole nation, a couple of French swear words, hockey as a national sport, and the seed of a desire to travel – for which I will be eternally grateful.”

I wonder who grows up wanting to travel compared to home-grown folks that want never to wander past their birth borders.  My assumption was, if you grow up traveling – if your wonder-lusting parents took you to other countries, arranged back-packing adventures, taught you languages, sent you to semester abroad, etc., you would become an adult who travels.

I was raised with little concept of vacation – as in the annual, planned, family excursion to the beach or big-time amusement park, like many other middle class American families have.  Other than car trips most Sunday’s to visit aunts, uncles, and grandparents, either a few miles or thirty to forty miles; and once each to Michigan and Florida to visit extended family, I didn’t travel as a child.

But, thanks to my brother-in-law Fred, I graduated high school and headed directly to a travel trade school, thinking of becoming a flight attendant.  But it was rail travel up and down the eastern seaboard that captured my heart for the next few years; broken up by a flight or two to California with friends, culminating in a big, cross-country, coming of age car trip with my friend Barb, before landing back home for a time.

The words, expanse or expand come to mind every time I think of travel.  Travel moments especially, because of their combined qualities of fear, excitement, dread, desire, hope and disappointment have the unique and innate capacity to dilate, broaden, fatten, amplify, enlarge, stretch, and increase in scope, the persons we are intended to become.

What is it about travel memories that make us transform truly terrifying moments, into funny travel tales?  Negative experiences become amusing stories of mishaps, turned adventure.

I will begin with the 2008 tale which I call, Beam Me Up Scotty, which was my mother of all anxiety attacks with seasickness on the side, aboard the QEII, my first cruise ship experience.  I was led to believe seasickness was a legend of the past and departed with the Mayflower.

I was a twentieth century woman who had endured twenty-four hours of labor without a drop of pain medicine.  I was a female Jack Sparrow with modern ballasts beneath me – who laughed “nah-ha-ha,” to seasickness.

Who knew that once we departed the New York Harbor and cruised beyond the Hudson River, for the Atlantic Ocean, a pale would descend over me that enshrouded my whole being and caused me to scream inside for a helicopter to get me immediately off of that freaking boat?  If I had had legs at that moment, I may have surrendered to the panic mixed with nausea, vertigo, and crazy nightmarish thoughts and jumped, life jacket training on the Lido deck be damned.

But I was cemented to my berth, knowing no helicopter rescue was forthcoming and feeling rather certain this catatonic hell would probably never end.  That was fun.

The Tale of the Bologna Salad was the second or third time on that trip that I looked with envy at my daughter’s plate, back at mine, and really wanted to steal my child’s food.  We were weary and had just settled into our hotel in Germany, where the next day we had planned to briefly meet a business associate with whom we had worked from the states for many years but had never met in person.

It was one of those travel moments when you’re hungry, tired, intolerant of everything and everybody – you just want both sustenance and sleep – now.  You have morphed into a colicky, cry-baby who cannot be soothed.  Everybody nearby catches your misery, like a cold, unless they’re just as travel-crazed as you are, then all burst into hysterics at the slightest provocation.  “Somebody, please break out the Xanax!”

I wanted something to eat that was light but satisfying.  When I saw on the menu, salad with Baden Baden ham, my eyes lit up and voila, my travel-crazed mind confirmed, “this is it.”

In my mind’s eye, Baden Baden ham, a specialty of this part of Germany, would be a mouth-watering combination of prosciutto and Canadian bacon, and this atop an attentively-crafted garden salad of mixed, dark, leafy, greens, Asiago cheese, and maybe fresh tomatoes.  You can imagine my dismay when Baden Baden ham turned out to be julienne-slices of bologna, the lettuce was the tasteless, nutrient-bare, iceberg variety, and the cheese I swear was American or maybe cheddar, if you stretch.

We howled!  My tormented laugh, however, was like when you’re embarrassed at a public mistake you’ve made, like tripping over a crack in the sidewalk.  You know you’ve done it; you turn around and look at the crack like it was an evil moat, that you’d be a fool not to have tripped over. But you want to be the bigger person in spite of feeling cheated, robbed or offended.

Suddenly, I’m no longer trapped inside that igloo, and I’m in Europe.  Join me for some more inner travels next week.

“The visible is the invisible written down.” – The Roots of Christian Mysticism

Nothing is perfect even if the grass looks greener on the other side.  Our perception of over there might be fooling us.  I’ve been sure I saw a massive, lumbering critter in the distance ahead of me in the woods, only to see up close that it was a leafy branch, waving in the breeze.

As it turns out, our eyes are scientifically unreliable instruments of truth.  Because of blind spots, fields of vision, resolution, visual angles, holes in pixelated pictures, and patterns of data sent to the brain – the content of what we see is based mostly on perception.  Then, imagination fills in the gaps of what we “think” we see.

“Don’t make a quick judgment, because I’m not finished yet,” a booming voice told me in a dream.  I instantly thought of the end of the Wizard of Oz where we see a somewhat frail old man speaking into a microphone, behind a curtain, behind a door.  Perceptions.

This dream reminded me of our young exuberant cat, Simpkin and how his approach to the office door has changed over time.  First, Simmy obsessed over the lace curtains, custom-made many years ago by my own hand, for the French doors separating the office from the dining room.

The making of those curtains was a labor-intensive endeavor, therefore, making them irreplaceable to this growing older woman, no longer much interested in custom-making anything.  The fully clawed Simpkin, after weeks of daily attempting to scale the irreplaceable lace curtains, and countless, successful unhinging events of the rod, (not me), at the bottom of the door – which by the way was installed upside-down, by whom, I will not disclose, turned his obsession to the door itself.

All of a sudden, it seems, in his grand old age of two, Simpkin had forgotten about the curtains and the doors, and wanted what’s on the other side.  We’d come full circle with Simmy, and the grass had become greener on the other side of the doors with the lace curtains.  His myopic vision had transferred to other things as he grew up a bit.

But, what about my vision, perception, and that dream?   I can look at my life one of two ways – like Dorothy from Kansas, or, Dorothy from Oz.  I can either see my life from a distance as an epic adventure, or up close and myopically, as a one-dimensional trial-by-fire ordeal.  What a different impression and attitude each choice in perception makes in the one-and-the-same life.

In dreams, they say that an older presence signals wisdom being imparted, and we should pay special attention to what elders are saying to us.  So, I should listen to that roaring, old man, shouldn’t I? “Don’t make a quick judgment, because I’m not finished yet,” he said.

I’ve had my life figured out many times over – in as many years as I’ve lived, being naturally contemplative.  Will it be door number 1, door number 2, or….?  I don’t know, but it will be an epic adventure, in the finding out; that much I’ve decided.

So, I’m thinking that when tempted to look longingly to the grass over there, where it appears so much more appealing than our grass, don’t make a quick judgment.  The master-gardener/architect isn’t finished yet with our landscape and in this “Snowy Evening,” according to Robert Frost, we have miles to go before we sleep.