Category: Travels
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Next Stop: Easy Street
“Well, this is where I get off, Baby Blue. I got a cozy little spread about a dozen miles out-of-town.” “This don’t look like no town to me, Buzz. The flies have taken over the ticket booth in the hole you say is the station.” “I’m not a man for big words, Blue, but I…
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Fabled Cuchlain
In the lobby of the General Post Office in Dublin is a bronze statue. It depicts an ancient Irish warrior, standing but slumped over in death. If you look closely, you can notice that he is really not standing…he is tied to a stake. A raven stands on his shoulder. The sculpture is by Oliver…
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Arriving, Departing or Just Passing Through
I stood hard against the tiled wall and made room for the rush of human traffic trying to pass me. I was thinking about insanity and the blindness of powerful people to hold sacred something that once had beauty and class. Beauty and class are rare commodities these days. I was in the bowels of…
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Don’t Cry For Me, Puerto Rico: My Final Postcard
If you want to use Google Earth to find me, just enter 18.44 N and 66.01 W. That’s me, sitting at the beach bar waiting for an order of nachos. I’ve licked my last stamp and stuck it to the corner of this postcard. I won’t be writing to you anymore–from this place. This is…
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Postcard From The Bottom Of The Green Lagoon
I have only one thing to do and that’s to be the wave that I am and then sink back into the ocean. Sink back into the ocean. Sink back into the ocean. –Fiona Apple. Theme from “The Affair” I know where my body is at the moment. I’m sitting on the sandy floor…
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Postcard From Condado Beach
There are times in life when a person has a particular need. Nothing else is enough. Only that one singular need. If I were lost, ten miles from Badwater, in the center of Death Valley, that need would be water. For me, in the bleak months of Winter ’15, that need is simply warmth. Warmth.…
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Between Patience and Fortitude
Despite what my weather app informed me about this afternoon–that the temperature was heading toward the low 40’s, I’m still having the feeling that my wool jacket (more of a pea coat) is merely for show. The cold wind slices through me like a Triscut dips through Roasted Red Pepper and Garlic Hummus. I’m chilled…
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Going Down The River On A Winter Day
Aboard the Amtrak, Train #238. Bound for Penn Station, NYC I can’t sleep in this cramped seat. It’s 4A, the window with a view of the Hudson River. But there is no view. It’s white enough for sunglasses. I see West Point across the water, barely. I snap a photo with my iPad mini. It…
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The Pink Flamingos of the Pacific Northwest
I asked my daughter, Erin, about her opinion of pink flamingos. “They have their place,” she answered, without taking more than five seconds to think it over. That place was in a front yard, several blocks from her home in Orting, WA. My wife and I were walking back from a brief shopping trip to…
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