Christmas trees

      We lived on a sort-of farm in (then) rural Fairfax County from when I was four years old until we moved to McLean, VA in sixth grade.  The house included a room with a 10-foot ceiling, unusual in the 60's, and a wall facing east that was completely windows; the room was known as 'the sun room.'

    At Christmas, my dad would slog out in the woods and capture a tree to decorate.  Even with the high ceiling, he'd usually have to cut a couple of feet off the top or the bottom to make it fit.   

    A few days before Christmas one year, George the Dog and I were lying on the sofa in the sun room admiring the decorated tree when I noticed that it was beginning to lean forward, and to my horror it crashed onto the hardwood floor, shattering any number of ornaments.  George and I got blamed, but I will promise to the end that I didn't do it.  George, despite intense interrogation also never admitted to the crime.  

    My mom, always one to change the rules in the middle of the game, decided that we could all open one present on Christmas Eve, so after the usual church thing that night we'd hustle home and do so. 

    Paula and I married in August 1977, and I continued the tradition of questionable DIY-harvested Christmas trees, of which Charles Brown would be proud.

 

    Paula, as her expression may indicate, was not impressed and in an after-Christmas sale at Zayre (yes, it was that long ago) picked up a fake tree, and we've had one ever since.  Her family in Oregon, however, kept on culling sad ones out of the forest.  And yes, I used to have hair.  And a 70's mustache, etc.  Lay off, OK?  It was cool back then.  I promise.

 

      She had been wise picking up a fantastic-plastic tree - things got pretty lean during the years of med school and residency and as kids began to pile up.

 

    These were the well-documented Bad Years of Christmas Light Strings (see Wikipedia article - "Psychiatric Admission Increase Thought Secondary to Christmas Lights") during which frustrated fathers would finally give up after hours of trying to figure out which bulb was bad, say naughty words, ball up the whole mess, jam it in the trash and go to K-Mart to buy a new string of lights.  

    Luckily, heaven-sent inspiration led to the invention of LED lighting and the world emerged from that terrible era.  And the kids kept coming.

 

And coming.

 

     And then they grew up and started going.

 

   And before we knew it, there weren't as many hands to help decorate the tree.

 

     And then there were years spent far from home, where Christmas was modest, and there was no time or place for a tree,

 

 though Paula would find one when she could, like this one in Bogota.

 

     Christmas stores wold pop up in December in Peru, with Chinese-made things complete with Spanish "Feliz Navidad" on the package. 

    So for several years, we had our Golden Tree, Economic Model.

 

     However, celebrating Christmas with the missionaries helped both them and us to have joy at that time of year.

      When the Mission Home in Huancayo, Peru was finished, Paula tracked down a nice tree (the nicest one they had!) and the missionaries helped us decorate.

 

      And it helped that there were little kids in the neighborhood.

 

    When we got home, it was time to begin spending time with our grandkids at their place at Christmas, with their tree.

    But Paula insisted we put up ours also, and sometimes we were lucky enough to have some of them around to help decorate it.

 

    This year we put up the tree by ourselves; everyone else is it at a distance now with their own kids and their own trees.

    Many of the ornaments brought back sweet memories.  There were no visitors, but it was beautiful by itself.  The house was still, and we held hands and talked quietly for a little while.

Dave & Paula

"You have to do SOMETHING!"

    That is one of the favorite sayings of my good friend Winston Trice, and I've heard it often during the forty-eight years that I've known him, and that's two months more than I've been acquainted with Paula.  Winston and I were in the same class in medical school, and we more or less stayed in touch during the tough years of residency training, he in Ophthalmology and I in OB-GYN.  The friendship got more active again when we realized that we shared activities such as whitewater kayaking and windsurfing, and we've gotten together several times a year since.  

    Meanwhile, I've known my brother Mark for sixty-seven years, and after the dust of education settled (he trained as an Orthopaedic Surgeon), he and Winston and I have shared a number of expeditions to a number of places in the world, dragging our wives along when they don't pay close enough attention to our plans.

    Winston, who is often referred to as "Uncle Winston" by us and "Skorch" by his grandkids, is always coming up with something unusual.  For instance, several years ago he brought a 4x8 sheet of plywood to Cape Hatteras, and proved that he could kite upwind on it. Yes, that's an electric unicycle.  And yes, that's the Matterhorn in the rear. It goes on and on.

     My brother, who shares the same need to do SOMETHING called recently and said, "Time to go to Florida!"  So, a couple of days after Thanksgiving he picked up Chris, a friend, drove to Richmond and picked up Uncle Winston, picked me up in Raleigh and got on I-95.  Eleven hours later we were stuck in the sand at the kiting launch on the causeway of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay.  The van wasn't THAT stuck and we got it out.  After a while.

    How come the Great White 15-passenger van seemed so loaded?  We took a count:

            4 guys ages 26 to 70

            4 cellphones tuned to 10 apps on wind forecasts, 

            4 suitcases or duffels

            4 kite pumps

            2 bags full of edibles (also known as junk food)

            3 helmets (the other guy says he's going to buy one)

            8 wetsuits

            8 pairs of watershoes

            9 swim trunks

            12 control bars with lines

            13 kiteboards

             3 foils

            16 kites

            16 pairs sunglasses, etc.

    We lucked into some days with reasonable wind, but this was because a cold front was sweeping through.  Hold it - cold in Florida?!  Yep.  One morning registered 39 F.  

    We scrounged all the neoprene we could find or steal from one another, but it was still cold.

    So how in the world do you maintain proper caloric balance with all that kiting and dealing with the frigid wind?  Luckily for us, we discovered that St. Petersburg, Florida has several establishments offering food, including Mexican, Thai, pizza and Cuban, and we would have found some others if we'd stayed longer.  That may have also explained some of the groaning of the Great White's suspension.  I think the reindeer at Pipo's Cuban Cafe has been getting into the rice and beans. A bit of 'junk in the trunk,' as they say.

    Several of the mornings, it was DARN hard to finally get out of the car in the cold and tug and grunt into a wetsuit.  Here, Uncle Winston and my brother Mark are watching Chris set up his kite in the cold wind out on the beach. It's clear that the photographer (me) is still in the van, and that Skorch and Mark are rarin' to go

    Not.

    One day dawned sunny, but without wind.  So, what do you do?  Shop crawl!!  If the wind blows, the shop guys can teach lessons.  If the wind doesn't blow, there was always something back at the shop that was ours simply for tapping our credit card.  Easy!

    After making sure that our credit limits still allowed for gas to get home, we drove to Jacksonville, Florida about four hours to the northeast, and visited another (cold) place to kite.  Just as we got there, so did the U.S. Demo Guy for CORE kites, a top-end German brand of which we own a bunch of examples.  This fellow's job for eight months of the year is to live in his Sprinter van and drive around the country in search of kiting spots where people would like to try his really excellent CORE kites.  He has been a pro kiter for many years, and competes during the other four months when he's not demo'ing.  While this might sound to some like a cool job, he's beginning to take his fiancée seriously and may get off the road before too long.  

    "You mean, you've pumped up and rigged these cool, brand new just-out-of-the-plastic-bag top-end kites, and we can just grab one and try it out?!  C'mon, do we look stupid?"

    He answered "Yes!"  ("Do you mean, 'Yes,' we look stupid,' or 'Yes, you can grab one and try it out?'  Don't answer that.")

    We looked at each other, shrugged, wondered if HE was stupid and had a great time with his really excellent kites.  We had the place (and his really excellent kites!) all to ourselves; only as we were packing up did other folks arrive to try them out.  

    So, as in all things, the trip had to end and we had to return to reality, such as it is. We slogged up I-95, dropping participants off as the Great White van went north.  Mark ended up with one of my CORE kites, a bag full of orange peels and soda cans, and several pounds of sand to muck out of his van.  

    You know, Uncle Winston has a good point - you really do have to do SOMETHING.  I think there is real value in continuing to get cold occasionally, crashing some kites, laughing with friends and seeing new places to do relatively dumb things.  

    Mark said to put Florida on the calendar for next year.  It was already there.

Dave

They did matter, at least to me

     Paula and I have helped clean out houses of folks who have passed away, and I've come home wanting to get rid of stuff.  I look around our own house and I realize that almost nothing will have any value after I'm gone, even to my own kids.  

     Among other things, there are thousands of pictures, now digitized, that bring me back to the moments when they were taken.  Almost no one will recognize the folks or the places, or what significance they had.  The vast majority won't mean anything to anyone.

     But they did to me, and that makes it hard to let them go.  

     I have a canvas duffel that my kind father bought me at the camping store when I was twelve.  I overloaded it, not knowing what I needed at Camp Thunderbird for my very first week away from home.  I'm sure that even Goodwill won't want it, but it still carries my name where I printed it on the side.  I remember carefully filling it with my clothes and gear, and then lugging it to our campsite from the bus. 

     Or my blue shirt tail, cut off by my flight instructor when I was sixteen the day I soloed an airplane for the first time; the piece of cloth was proudly hung up in the airport lounge with others.  No one will know the strength of that moment to me.

     My missionary calendar book, full of appointments that brought joy or heartache, names of people for whom I worked and prayed, themselves now long gone. 

     The beautiful small plate received on our wedding day from Mrs. Palmer, the kind neighbor that gave me a ride to school every day during sixth grade.  She talked to me as she drove, and seemed to care. 

     And thus the stuff ends up that was attached to a life.  It's moved aside, leaving room for someone else to have the millions of small and large experiences that will define their character, which in the end is one of the only things that you can take with you. 

     Ah, but won't the memories somehow cling to that kayak helmet?  Shouldn't they recognize how important that diploma was when they come to clean out the house?  Not likely - it's time for them to build their own memories, unencumbered by my things.

     But for a few more moments, let them matter, at least to me.

Dave 

Addicted to Pain!

          As I've mentioned before, I learned to ride a bike when I was eight years old (slow learner) and I haven't stopped since.  I commuted to work by bicycle for almost 25 of my 28 years in private practice.  I would have done it more during residency training, but when my father found out that I was riding to Duke Hospital at 4:45 AM to make rounds and often riding back home in the dark late the next night, he mumbled something about throwing good money after bad and lent me enough to buy a $750 car.  

        Paula and I rode up Provo Canyon when we were dating as students at BYU about a thousand years ago, 

and we've done several bike tours as "vacations" through the years.  It's a great way to really explore a place; you get to smell the lavender fields (and the cows), see the people (and their camper vans hurtling down the roads), and get a feel for the clime (including rain, hail, wind, cold, etc.).  

        So when we were doing so in Croatia last year and our beloved friend and guide Sue Clark mentioned a trip that she and the other guides and the owner of the small New Zealand company had put together in Montenegro, Paula said, "Sign us up!"

        Easy, right?  Just jump on a bike and see the world!  Not if that world is described as having around 80,000 feet of vertical to be ridden up over two weeks and 500 kilometers' distance.  It means that although you're riding your bike a couple of times a week at home, that's not going to cut it.

        Instead, it means a lot of work trying to get in good enough condition for such a trip, with daily rides, 50-mile ones a couple of times a week in which you are looking for, instead of avoiding, the biggest hills in (surprisingly hilly) Raleigh, NC, etc.  This all has to start at least a couple of months prior to the trip.  Sometimes the weather would interfere, like this attempted ride after a big rain.

          And if the weather was too bad, "riding the rollers" in the kitchen.  (Note:  This is not actually me - my crashes on the rollers were even more spectacular, and this guy had the sense to wear a helmet.)

          Sadly, Paula's beloved brother Alan was fading quickly as we were getting ready.  He passed away about ten days before the trip, and his funeral was scheduled for the day we were to land in Croatia.  Paula rescheduled her ticket and attended, while I went ahead to Dubrovnik.  I was able to see her and listen to the service thanks to the internet, while I sat on a balcony in a hotel.

        Paula and I don't ride on Sundays, so I did the Monday ride with the other seven members of the group (all New Zealanders, or "Kiwis") and the three guides, and we picked up Paula at the end of the ride.  By this time, in four days she had traveled to Oregon, attended her brother's funeral, caught a redeye flight back to Raleigh, and then boarded a three-leg flight to Croatia.  We helped her navigate the parking lot curbs, ignored her tangled attempts at speech and buckled her in the van, still severely disoriented.

        Although the next day's ride began in Croatia, we quickly arrived at the border with Bosnia, which required a passport check to leave Croatia, then a half-mile later a second check to enter Bosnia.  Another ten miles or so later, another stamp at the crossing to leave Bosnia, and after a half-mile a fourth check to enter Montenegro, where we rode for the next ten days or so.  So how do you do a border crossing on a bicycle?  That's right, on your bicycle, with your passport in your back pocket.  The border guys were unimpressed, mumbling something in a Slavic tongue while we smiled, said "Thanks," and pedaled off.  

        The owner of Kiwi Style Bike Tours is a former bicycle racer, having competed internationally for New Zealand in his younger days.  (He's on the left.  The one on the right refuses to race.)

        He offers ten two-week tours each year, most of them including famous mountain stages of the Tour de France and other European major races, and they are booked up years in advance.  The Croatian trip last year and this trip to Montenegro are considered his "easy" tours.  Arranging the hotels, transfers and everything else involved in getting a dozen "guests," three guides, two vans and bicycles stored somewhere in France together occupies the fragments of his time when he's not on the road scouting the actual routes of the trips.  We were lucky that he and two of the delightful guides from the Croatia outing were on this one. 

         Where's Montenegro? you might ask.  It's across the Adriatic Sea from Italy and was one of the six entities balled up into "Yugoslavia" after World War I.   This was after millennia of various dominations by the Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Russians, French, Venetians, the Detroit City Council and about fourteen other known groups.   The country itself only became a free-standing nation in 2006, when a close vote was held to separate itself from its former conglomeration called "Serbia and Montenegro."  Montenegro is working on becoming an official EU partner, while already having joined NATO and adopted the Euro as its official currency.

        So what's Montenegro like on a bicycle?  It is said that while absolutely deserving visitors, the country is perhaps ten years behind Croatia tourism-wise, and that's almost completely to the good.  Much of the economic wealth is concentrated on its coast, where most of the tourist dollars are also spent.  The inner topography is very mountainous and the towns are small, and prices haven't caught up...yet. 

        We tackled Durmitor National Park on the third day.  It's a beautiful, raw area in the mountains, with a single-lane road winding up and down.  I did about 6,000 feet of vertical that day, and while the guides took pity on Paula and let her skip some of it, she and I soloed back to the inn by ourselves in the wind, cold and a bit of rain.  

        The sauna at the end was perfect!  Unfortunately, while there, a WhatsApp message came through saying that the guides were storing the bikes for the night and I needed to get the bike lights off ours to charge.  Not much to do but grab whatever was available and go down.

        The daily rides were varied but always impressive.  We spent one day holed up in a hotel while a major storm passed through, but the next day looked better.  Don't trust Montenegran weather reports.  Moments after setting off on a 30-kilometer ride through twenty-some tunnels on another day, the bottom fell out.  Trying to ride through the longer tunnels guided only by the blinking bike lights ahead of you, as seen through rain-speckled glasses, while having no idea of what potholes are lurking is a great way to stay awake.  

         Another day found us with fellow-travelers on the narrow roads.  

        Stops at little cafes along the way were cool, and the soup was hot. 

        On a particularly beautiful day, we climbed up to a mausoleum at the top Mount Lovcen, built in the late 1970's by the Yugoslavian Communist government on the site where several small chapels had periodically housed the remains of King Petar II Petrovic-Njegos.   He had decided he wanted to be buried at the top of that mountain, and the first chapel was built in 1848, where he was buried when he died three years later.  However, with various wars and the ever-changing political situations, his progressively-deteriorating remains went back and forth to Cetinje, which was periodically the capitol of the variously defined limits of what was sometimes termed "Montenegro."  The Communists after World War 2 finally said, "Доста тога!" roughly translated as "OK, enough of that!!" tore down the old chapel and built a neo-classical or whatever thing on the mountain, and to which we grunted and sweated on our bikes in order to visit.  The bike ride up wasn't easy, 

nor were the 461 steps finally bringing one to the structure itself from the road's end just before the left bottom corner of the picture.

        Other days were near-idyllic, such as one riding along through villages along the Bay of Kotor.  Looks great, no? 

        Yeah, well, about a half-mile later, the road turned left, with gradients up to 16%.  Ooof.

        The last day's ride was one of the best, a route called The Serpentine, climbing above Kotor City itself for 3,100 feet.  

As typical, it was a single-lane road, but with 26 tight switch backs this time.

        At one point, two gigantic tour buses found themselves nose to nose, (OK, I didn't actually get a picture, but you get the idea)

and when we were stopped by the jam, the two bus drivers where on the road waving their arms and screaming at each other in some Slavic tongue which I had the good luck not to understand.  Finally one gave in and backed up to a (minor) widening in the road and we pulled ahead, racing the scattered cars back down The Serpentine.   

        The last couple of days were spent in Perast, a small village 20 minutes up the road from the cool but tourist-infested Old Town of Kotor.  Sharp-eyed Paula noted a water leak in our first-assigned room, and they had to upgrade us to a room right on the water.  Darn.

        So, in the end was it a good way to see a really out-of-the-way place?  Indeed, though I've been threatened with divorce or worse by Paula if I consider doing anything like it again.  Hmmm...maybe on ebikes?

Dave & Paula

Times to treasure

      We put the beach towel bins back in the attic this afternoon.  

      The beds in the extra bedrooms have been made, and the toys have been picked up and put back on the shelves.  Everything is just about back in order, and the house is once again calm and quiet...Rats...  

      It was a great week-and-a-couple-of-days.  Folks started showing up on Friday a week ago, and by that evening it was hard to find a place at the table to help eat the pork butt Paula cooked on the grill all day, but it was easy to find someone to laugh with and catch up on what they'd been doing.  The little 'squad' of four- and five-year-old granddaughters found the dress-up clothes and ran around the house in some extravagant outfits.  ("Wasn't that part of someone's wedding dress?")  And of course the fish needed fed.

     The next day everyone made it safely to the rented beach house two hours to the east; the 'squad' had important conversations in the back seat on the way down, such as whether or not you could actually live on the moon (by the way, you can't - apparently, "tomatoes can't grow there," thus deciding the question).

     The weather was rotten, as Tropical Storm/Hurricane Debby stalled on the South and North Carolina coast.  Yeah, but the swimming pool was great, 

and you could still dig holes on the beach when it wasn't raining.  

       The aunts brought cookies and enough snacks to push everyone into BMI danger, and Oh, wow!  Did you see that guy boulder-climbing the wall on the Olympics playing nearly constantly on the TV?!  A birthday was celebrated, 

and cries of victory and defeat and laughter at the card games rang through the house long after I couldn't stay awake.  Aunt Kathleen had the annual Ice Cream Party complete with nose glasses, of course,

and Sophia almost made her first kayak roll.

     It's always sad on Friday afternoon when the very first item goes back in a suitcase, and especially on Sunday morning before sunrise, when the last family is quickly hugged on the sidewalk before dragging their luggage into the airport terminal.  The drive home is quiet, save for reminding ourselves of anything coming up in the next couple of days.

    That night, waiting for sleep, a feeling of fierce love for all of them came over me.  You never know how many more beach trips there will be with the whole gang, and I wanted to hang on to those moments just a little bit longer.  

     So, the last load of laundry just finished getting folded, and I put the boogie boards back in storage.  It's just Paula and I, and some pictures to sort through, and some great memories of having them all together one more time.  

Dave & Paula