Category Archives: Travel
Accidental Sex Education Field Trip
I’ve written about my adventures teaching in a four room rural parish school, but not about the adventures of the young new parish priest there. Father Joe was an enthusiastic new priest, full of energy and wonderful ideas for our school and parish. Some of which turned out well, and others, not so much.
He and our principal, an elderly dumpling-shaped, cheerful little nun, took a busload of seventh and eighth graders to tour the Huntsville Alabama Space Museum. The day went well and on the return trip Father scouted out a restaurant for his hungry students. They stopped at one that had the innocuous name The Family Restaurant on a large sign over the building. Father went in ahead to check out the food and how they were set up for a crowd. It turned out to be a busy buffet, but the manager assured Father Joe that the students could all sit at tables pulled together and if they waited just a few moments, the line at the buffet would be clear for them.
Of course, as soon as everyone got settled in, there were numerous bathroom requests. It was decided that the boys would go downstairs to the bathrooms first. Then, when they returned, the girls could go. Eventually, some of the girls began to complain when the boys never returned, so one of them was sent to check on what was holding up the boys.
Very quickly the girl raced back breathless and saucer eyed, yelling loudly, “There are women with no shirts on down there, carrying trays back and forth across the hall that goes to the bathrooms.”
Father Joe gasped, Sister turned pale, and the manager came running over to explain that there was a topless bar downstairs. Father Joe, turned to Sister in panic, pleading, ” I can’t go down there. You’ll have to go get the boys.”
Sister set off, her small plump body quivering with righteous indignation. As she marched with head held high past the bar, she spotted her students peeking out from the bathroom. Pouncing on the closest, she pulled him out by the ear shouting fiercely, “All of you, get upstairs right now.”
As she prodded the sheepish boys hurriedly past the bar, she heard a waitress yelling excitedly, “There’s a nun out there. There’s a nun out there.”
Quickly, they shepherded their snickering troops back out to the bus stopping only at a MacDonalds for take out and a bathroom.
Knowing that word would spread like wildfire throughout the parish before Sunday services the next day, Father Joe bravely diffused parental indignation by preaching on the misuses of the word, family.
Travel Visions
An opulence of travel visions:
Paris, London, Lisbon, Prague,
beauty rampant with history and art.
Yet etched forever in my mind
the beaches and cross-crowned cliffs
along the shores of Normandy.
A cliff face sheering from the ocean,
Pointe du Hoc, where army Rangers
climbed point blank into German guns.
Now, just empty bunkers on pitted earth
and beaches, wave washed innocent,
below silent sentinels left behind.
Row on row of small white crosses
guarding fields of blood-rich ground,
Old Glory whipping, snapping in the wind.
The Explosion of Experience: Enlarging My World View
After years of feeling like white noise to family and friends, since starting my blog three months ago, I have been shamelessly exploiting blogging as a way of expressing some of the opinions, insights, and experiences I’ve garnered in seventy-five years of living the questions of life. Now, that I’ve done my share of flooding the blogging world with the pent-up musings of a frustrated guruh wanna be, I’m focusing outward and discovering the amazing riches of exploring the world across all kinds of physical and metaphysical borders through other blogs.
It’s like being able to teleport yourself anywhere immediately and to experience the world through both another’s literal views and their mental viewpoints to far exceed your own limited mind and means. It’s what books , television, and travel have done in the past, except this is on a much more personal level and has the advantages of immediacy, convenience, freedom of choice, and even interaction, all without the need for affluence or influence.
I reread this and it sinks in even more, how mind expanding and world changing the internet is capable of being. Not just for young revolutionaries on the other side of the world, but for people of any age, any gender, any nationality, any religious persuasion, any financial means, any limits, as long as they can get to a library or coffee house that has computers and the internet.
I think if I had the means, I would pour money into making it available to all people in every country. I realize there’s misinformation and poison on it also, but where there are human beings, those exist. In the past, if our immediate environment was limited to that, the possibilities for overcoming it were few. Those possibilities have now exploded exponentially.
I want to mention once again just several of the blogs that I look forward to.
Doctor Dad @ carlocmd.wordpress.com; Beautifully described father-sons relationship, and insights into the daily experience of a caring, committed doctor in a third-world country.
patricklatter.smugmug.com; Vicarious mountain hiking experiences through amazing photography of the awesome landscapes of Canada along with first person commentary on the experience with each photo.
Field Notes from Fatherhood.com; a blog by a teacher in a private English school in Hungary. Excellent on many levels on parenting, teaching from the insider’s view, travel with children.
youllshootyoureyeout-kathy.blogspot.com; delightful travel experiences, laced with touching honest reflections on relating to a beloved father, once a public figure, now suffering from Alzheimer’s.
For humor: (of course) The Bloggess and also maleparentalunit.blogspot.com(one of my sons’ blog, so some prejudice involved.)
Traveling
“What is traveling? Changing your place? By no means! Traveling is changing your opinions and your prejudices.” Anatole France (1844-1924)
Hmmm…… What opinions have I changed? What prejudices? Hmmmm……that’s very expensive travel.
Gifts of Age (Part Three): Milestones, Kidney Stones, and Cobble-stones
Shake, Rattle, and Roll
Of all the birthday milestones such as: school age, driving age, voting age, and drinking age, the most unexpectedly celebratory one is Medicare age. Because without Medicare, just trying to stay alive would take an NFL star quarterback’s salary and bonuses. It also needs to coincide with retirement age, because we are suddenly averaging at least three doctor appointments a week. Since these often involve MRI’s, CAT scans, ultrasounds, treadmill tests, and more, this leaves a work week of about fifteen hours. My husband counted recently and discovered that he actually has one internist and sixteen specialists. I think that’s at least one specialist per body part. On the way to appointments with these, we find ourselves humming, “Getting to know us. Getting to know all about us” (our colons, our kidneys, our prostates, and mysterious moles in places that have never before seen the light of day). I suggest forgetting credentials and looking for specialists that are young and good looking, because believe me, we don’t know the ultimate in physical intimacy until we reach the age of sixteen specialists.
For some of us, a more positive aspect of retirement age is the opportunity to travel. We were blessed with thirteen years of free air travel, while one of our sons worked for an airline. So we got to travel abroad much more than we would have otherwise. Unfortunately, even in my best years, I was athletically challenged.
So my travel experiences often became unexpectedly medical:
a broken pinky finger while playing miniature golf in California,
a sprained ankle from a missing sidewalk tile in Spain,
an Achilles tendon screaming in protest when chasing taxis in Paris,
a gaping hole in my smile after a crusty bread roll removed the crown on a front tooth in Portugal,
traveling stoned on Benadryl after an English castle tour revealed a severe allergy to mold,
and finally loose dentures from riding in a wheelchair over cobblestones almost everywhere.
Pecs and Buns
Breathes there a woman, from age so dead, who never to herself has said, “Now, there goes a nice set of buns.”
I was asked recently, “When did you realize you were getting old?”
Realizing and feeling are two very different things. At seventy-eight I still don’t feel old, because all the people I’ve been at different ages are still part of me. Remembering is not like imagining. Remembering takes me back. I don’t have to imagine what it feels like to be young, because I’ve been there, done that.
But, I also remember clearly the day in my fifties, when I first realized I had reached the age of invisibility. I went into an auto repair shop for some help and though several men glanced my way, no one came forward to ask what I wanted. It was a wake-up call leading me to notice that men’s heads didn’t turn anymore when I came into a room or passed them on the street.
That was a traumatic entrance into an angst filled change of life.
Rites of Passage
Grieve with us for youthful beauty lost,
remembering our vibrant gracefulness
bright’ning eyes and turning manly heads.
Mourn it with us. Keen our woman’s loss.
A strange invisibility is now our aging fate,
like graying ghosts, unseen, we walk.
Beat your breast. Shred your public garment.
The maggot of our egocentricity
leaves a hollowness of empty vanity.
Wail. Keen. Howl. Beat the ritual drum.
Celebrate the death of youth until it can be borne.
EoN 1993
However, as I moved into my sixties, I discovered there actually was an upside to becoming invisible. This stage of my life involved a lot of travel, so I was spending many hours waiting in airports. There I discovered the fun of watching the young men walk by. I worried that someone would notice and consider me a dirty little old lady, until I remembered that I had on my invisibility of age cloak. After that, I spent many enjoyable hours comparing buns and deciding whether I was a pecs or buns woman. Someone needs to write a ‘Pecs and Buns’ song, similar to ‘Tits and Ass’ from the musical, Chorus Line.
