My Trails

People walk past one another hundreds of times each day. We pass in stores, in shopping malls, on the street, in neighborhoods on bicycles, and – it seems to me – usually without a glance or a smile of recognition, content in our isolated world of comfortable individualism. But take a hike, deep into the forest, anywhere in the country, and notice the change when people meet. Almost everyone I pass on the trail will smile and say a pleasant greeting, sometimes exchange comments or questions about the geography, or offer up words of encouragement.  The hiking trail seems to bond people like few other activities do.  It’s really nice, I can put it no other way

Today, as I hiked the Heart Of Rocks Loop in Chiricahua, I met two young ladies hiking the same trail I was on. They would pass me with youthful energy, disappear up the trail out of sight, and then as they stopped to rest, I would overtake them with my steady plodding stride. This continued for most of the morning, and each time we would meet, we exchanged greetings and talked for a few minutes. I learned that they were from Switzerland, here on vacation and seeing the sites in the Southwest. There next stop was White Sands National Monument.  

All this got me to thinking about something. Everywhere I’ve traveled across the country – all the parks and forests and attractions, on the trails and at vistas, at campgrounds in rental RV’s – are mobs of foreigners from all over the world. Tour busses unload droves of eager, camera clickers at each pull-out.  It seems that they can’t get enough of our country. 

A while ago I was caught up in the notion that it would be a great adventure – even enlightening – to be a world traveler. Let’s go to New Zealand! Let’s go to Australia!  How about some exotic local in the Caribbean? How I longed to tell everyone I had been there. How I wished I could fly away to distant land; cruise the oceans to adventure and beyond. 

There are over 390 National Parks in the United States and somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 National Monuments. Combine that with hundreds of State Parks, National Forests, and Historical Monuments – literally thousands of square miles of awesome beauty and wilderness – and there’s enough to keep a traveler busy for a lifetime. The average American has seen only a fraction of the beauty of this country.  A lot of people visit a National Park and never walk more than a few feet from their car, others may hike a hundred yards into the forest and then return to their cars, promising never to do anything that strenuous again. 

Is it just that we want to see everything on the run?  Do we want to enjoy this vast and beautiful world at the speed of a metal capsule. Do we want to say we’ve been there and saw it all?  Do we enjoy the thought of traveler to a distant country?

  Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with traveling to other countries and enjoying there beauty.  Sometimes there are relatives or history to be gleaned. I would love to see the Great Wall in China and the Pyramids in Egypt  Just that I hear stories of people that retire and travel around the world for a few months, come back home, sit in their easy chair, and then say, “now what?”  Take a look at what is in your own back yard.  The grass is not always greener on the other side of the ocean. 

There was a time very early in my life when I had a good healthy head of natural hair. It seems almost preposterous that I would even think about this now, but it all came back to me when I recently came across a photograph of myself taken shortly before graduation from high school. There I was – young, handsome, clear skin, innocent, and yes – hairy. It’s almost hard to believe that in the 60’s, I was considered a rebel sporting my “surfer hair.”

In the late 1960’s, I grew curly locks down over my ears to celebrate the hippie craze, but it wasn’t long after that that I started noticing a reckless thinning across the summit region of my forehead. For a while I did the comb-over method, involving displacing strands of hair in a futile attempt of homemade transplant therapy. If it wasn’t windy or I didn’t make any sudden moves, I could camouflage the balding area quite well. Eventually, however, most of my hair just gave up the will to live.

I never liked the way I looked when I lost my hair. Some men with small noses and round little faces look good bald, but I have prominent German features that don’t compliment baldness very well. I even tried to shave my head – the accepted fad today – but everyone said I looked like one of the Munsters. I guess I should have been OK with the fact that I was bald, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I looked goofy.

For a few years I always wore a hat. My work was mostly outside – farming, logging, and carpentry – so it fit right in with my occupation. Even danger had its rewards with the addition of a hard hat to my apparel. I felt comfortable with a hat on; it became a part of me and I a part of it. My hat protected my delicate head from sunburn and shaded my eyes. It would keep pesky insects from biting and add a bit of warmth on a cold day. I would sooner leave the house without my pants on (I don’t think I ever did that!) than without my hat.

And then I entered a period of my life where I knew I needed a change. The kids were getting involved in school and I would be attending concerts, plays and all kinds of parent activities. I wanted to take some classes at the local college, and I was training for an office job at work. All these activities suggested that I carry a code of conduct and dress that conformed to something normal. I either had to get over my self-consciousness about my baldness, or go to the dark side of deception.

There’s nothing wrong with a little deceit and deception – we all do it. We color our hair, paint our faces, replace glasses with contacts, shave our heads, wear uncomfortable shoes and clothes for style, drive pretty vehicles, wear wigs, and get implants. Please don’t tell me you don’t care what you look like. We all want a little admiration.

I hadn’t worn my hairpiece for many months and decided to put it on for Daryl’s birthday dinner. It was more of a joke than anything, and I was interested in how everyone would react. The wig was made many years ago and it really doesn’t go with my face anymore, but someone that didn’t know me, wouldn’t realize it’s not real. The reaction I got from everyone was all over the place. I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: We perceive ourselves a lot different than other people do and appearance is a mystical thing.

These are the reactions I got from everyone. See if you can figure out who you are: One person was shocked. One person had a sarcastic smile. One person was surprised. One person said, “What do you want to wear THAT thing for.” One person said, “Wow, it makes you look younger!” One person was disappointed because I didn’t look as much like Dad.

This is a true story Karen told me on my last visit to Pittsburgh. I thought it was so hilarious that I had to write it down. As she told me the story, I could see the irony of the way men sometimes act on an all too personal level. Just read on and you will see what I mean.

Karen’s boys are always involved in sports either through school or within the community. As it is difficult to find enough money to finance sports for kids, booster clubs will hold various fundraisers. 15 year old Nate’s baseball team boosters were organizing a spaghetti dinner/bake sale. Each family was asked to help work the spaghetti dinner as well as to donate baked goods for the bake sale. As Karen had planned to be out of town the day of the spaghetti dinner and the boys would be with their dad, she called Terry and asked if he would be able to work the dinner with Nate. She assured him she would do the baking for the bake sale and he would just have to pick the goodies up when he picked the boys up on Sunday morning. He and Nate could deliver them to the bake sale Sunday evening. He agreed.

Karen spent the day before the bake sale making peanut butter cup cookies and a delicious tray of caramel apple bars. She packaged and arranged everything in individual bags, set them in a low cardboard tray, covered the tray with clear wrap, and fearing her cats might find the goodies, placed everything inside the oven for safekeeping.

Before going to bed Saturday night, she told Nate, “The cookies are in the oven. When your Dad gets here, make sure you get them out and take them with you.” He replied “ok”. She texted Terry to remind him to take the baked goods when he picked up the boys. The next morning she also left a note taped to the front door that said, “Grab the cookies (in the oven) when you leave”. She left the house before the boys awoke confident that all was in order.

Monday, as she drove home from work Karen was thinking how good a piece of those apple caramel bars would taste. She had thrown some of the ends/duds of the caramel apple bars into a plastic baggie when she was packaging everything else up for the sale. As she walked into the kitchen to retrieve the baggie of apple caramel bar crusts she was puzzled by the fact that the baggie was gone, as was the baggie of overcooked peanut butter cup cookies. The boys had returned home earlier from school so she thought that maybe they had nabbed them and were upstairs snacking on them. She called up to the boys but they hadn’t seen any baggies. As she walked back toward the kitchen she began to feel an underlying dread – like that feeling you get when you know you’ve locked your keys in the car, or when you go on vacation and are pretty sure you left the coffeepot on. Sure enough when she reached down and pulled the oven door open… there, just as she had left them, was the tray of cookies.

She said she yelled for Nate who came running down stairs sure that his mom was seriously injured or something was terribly wrong. He stood there dumbfounded as she just pointed at the beautifully arranged baked goods resting in their protected spot. Unable to articulate the anger, confusion, and growing panic that she was feeling she said, “What exactly did you take to the bake sale Nate?” He said, “I took those two bags of cookies you had on the counter, why?” To say that Karen was mortified would be a vast understatement, all she kept saying was “no….no, no, no….” Nate, sensing her distress, tried to help by saying, “Mom, I’m pretty sure someone bought them because they weren’t there when the bake sale was over.” Karen hissed, “The only person who would have bought two bags of crumbs at a bake sale would be a strung-out junkie with the munchies!” Nate wandered away completely baffled as to why his normally sane mom had gone off the deep end.

I’m not going to tell you what Karen said to Terry on the phone when she called to ask how it was possible that after all of the years they were married, he could think that she would ever send a bag of cookie bits and a bag of gooey apple pieces which had congealed into a ball by the time it arrived (as reported by Nate), to a bake sale. He responded, “Well, I thought it was a little odd.” And to add insult to injury, Karen had been in contact with the chair of the bake sale prior to the event. She had emailed her what she was sending and also that Terry would be there in her place. The idea of what the women who were organizing the bake sale must have thought when Nate waltzed in and plopped two baggies of yuck on their lovely bake sale table….well, it was a few hours….ok maybe days…before Karen was able to see the humor in the situation. Once she had gained a bit of perspective she sent a quick email to the chair apologizing for the mistake and explaining what had happened. The chair responded back cordially, but Karen is pretty sure that the boosters club won’t be asking her to organize any bake sales any time soon. She figures that she’ll be relegated to clean-up duty for eternity, which might not be such a bad thing.

Disclaimer: I want to give credit to Karen for “cleaning up” and editing much of this story. I tried to write it with a personal perspective of how men function differently than women and she expertly conveyed my thoughts as I originally wrote them. As she told me the story, I could see myself…not listening or paying attention…making the same crazy mistake. From time to time, even though not the same scenario, I’m pretty sure I’ve been there, done that.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about commenting on the comment. At the end of every post there is a section devoted to the purpose of capturing a few thoughts by the reader. It is a place where we express our impressions, offer up an opinion, and often ask a question that probes deeper into the story. There is nothing that compliments a good post more than a few well thought-out comments by the reader. But on the other hand, bad judgment and incompetence from the commentator can ruin a post, leaving an embarrassing place no one wants to return to.

Sometimes you can tell by the comment how much we enjoy renewing connections with each other. I think most of the time family members are just hungry for news and we tend to ask a lot of questions in order to keep the dialog going. Especially for me, having lost so much time from the family, I enjoy reading your posts more than I can tell you.

For the writer, feedback we get from a comment can be encouraging. Everyone likes to think that his or her stories and essays are interesting for the reader. Those of us who are beginning bloggers have that deep-down fear that what we write isn’t very good, and it always makes us feel better after an encouraging comment or two. Writing becomes easier when we know the reader cares enough to respond to our thoughts.

Once in a while the comment section turns into a forum of debate. This usually happens when politics enter the discussion, but it can also involve preferences for various electronic devices and mobile phones in particular. It’s usually lighthearted and takes the form of kidding more than anything else. (Did I hear today that Apple will soon release the iPhone to Verizon?)

For me, the art of commenting is not my strong suit. All too often my comments have taken an underlying twist of meaning. I try to be cute and it comes out degrading; I try to be funny and it has undertones of sarcasm; I try to be witty and it turns out silly. Honestly, it’s never my intention to say anything that would hurt anybody’s feelings; it just comes out of me and I can’t control it. I know I should never write anything late at night and hit the send button before I’ve had a chance to proof read in the morning. To show you how twisted and warped my sense of humor is – I was thinking of posting this with comments closed!

I just purchased a Verizon wireless USB760 modem for my laptop. It is super fast, portable, and easy to use. When I had the browser on my Blackberry it seemed to be slower than dial-up at times, occasionally it would sit and wait for what seemed like an eternity before it would catch again. I was a little bit reluctant to go this configuration after a disappointing experience with the phone, but I’m very pleased with the performance I’m getting on my laptop.

It actually runs faster than DSL and I can attest that it is far superior to the wireless performance I was using previously. The only drawback is the access fees: $39/mo for 250 megs, $59/mo unlimited. I thought I could get away with 250 megs but they were gone in two days so I switched up. Streaming movies gobbles up bits by the carload, and if you go over, the fees are astronomical. The lady that called from Verizon said that at the rate I was going, I could end up with a bill of $600.

I’m not sure how this would compare to a satellite connection. If you are way out in the desert in some remote area between Arizona and California, you may not get a good signal, but it sure would be easier to set up!