Best Vacations: Old Friends/Soul Friends

While my life is clearly not well-heeled, it features one priceless element: friends. Midday Monday I drove up to Madison, WI and met my college roommate for lunch.

Though she lives in New York and travels around the country selling wine, when she lands nearby—Madison or Coralville—she always invites me to drive there, spend the night in a posh hotel and eat nouveau cuisine in a trendy restaurants, where often her high end ($50 a btl) wine is served.

Which I enjoy immensely, but not nearly as much as our talk. This year what with the “Spy” Project and the death of my funny Valentine, Pat Kurt, I have boodles to share. 

The special part of all this, however, is that there so much I don’t have to tell her, so much she already knows about then—the continuum of my life.

Sometimes I feel sad for young people. By the number of their years they don’t have old friends. And this is wonderful week. Having seen my college roommate on Monday, next week I will see another of my old best buds from the 70s when we were Denver roommates.

Shop Till You Drop: Dead

Last Thursday with a couple birthdays looming I took myself into Younkers. The place was practically deserted.  No secret department stores can’t/won’t provide staff anymore, but notable was the paucity of customers.

Not that I was surprised; stats confirm that consumers are carrying less debt. How indeed would people leverage the equity in their houses? Many have lost them!

Nonetheless, the National Retail Assoc. and biz/finance class is apparently surprised that retail sales have not returned to previous pre-recession i.e. gangbuster levels and has had to lower its growth forecast from over 4% to 3.5%.  Other stats reveal people don’t have as many credit cards or as much debt on the ones they have as they once did.

Duh, Folks! You haven’t lowered it enough! Cast a critical eye on the middle class if you are waiting for the “rebirth of the shop-till-you-drop” spender. What with recession, immigration, etc. a goodly percent of it has slid into the have-not class. Good luck waiting for a come-back.

Poisoning Democracy?

Sometime in the last 24, I caught a item that didn't make the national news and I get the sense, barely made the local Iowa.
On line, this non-explanation in the Clinton Herald: "The Palo Alto County Sheriff's Office says the plane owned by Steier AG Aviation was hit in a wing flap while spraying a field in Fairfield Township on Friday morning. The pilot landed safely at Steier's landing strip in Whittemore (IA)." 
Somebody shot it. Further research reveals 3 similar incidents in Texas, 1 in Idaho, 1 in Missouri, and couple in Canada. 
The gun mania, unique to this country that has produced a shooting every couple weeks often by the mentally disturbed guy, can't be attributed to the NRA alone. 

In fact, it makes a critical eye wonder if gun mania isn't a broader statement of failing faith in American democracy. What with the cancer rate, most people abhor being being sprayed, especially from the air, but they have no notion how to stop it. For a decade and a half, the Des Moines Water Works waited for voluntary curbs on nitrogen farm groups instituted to reduce nitrates in city H20. It never happened. They finally filed law suit on the local drainage districts which provide direct conduit into the Raccoon River, where the city gets its water. The farm orgs howled like proverbial stuck pigs. Who do we file suit on?

No Plain Jane--RIP Jane Lyons Boffeli

The Denver sister called with sad, but not unanticipated news yesterday: Jane Lyons Boffeli succumbed to the cancer she battled so fierce and spiritedly the past years. One marveled at it, especially when we visited her in May, found her fashion model thin, voluble as ever. 
(Love those two--the Denver sister and hubby ever appropriate: when I faltered before challenge of what to give a dying woman; they came with the quintessential one: Colorado weed!)
Jane had been through rounds of chemo and a couple remissions by then, and we wondered how, where she got the force and fierce, since sis and I both know neither own that.  
Jane & Dave lived in a geodesic dome-abode in the woods that felt like a tepee with electricity and indoor plumbing. She had filled it with Indian memorabilia, which intrigued me, as her personal style had a sparcity that is the antithesis of my ornate Victorian one. 
I recall a sunny day in summer 2013, when Jane and I sat on her deck among the trees and flowers, drank beer, her favorite libation, and I presented her with another just-right gift the Denver sister hadn't time to bring: a wind chime. Jane enthusiastically loved it (I take half the presents I get back) and installed it just behind us, where it tinkled like a bright blithe spirit throughout our visit that day and was still tinkling in its place in May.
That afternoon I discovered in Jane Boffeli someone so rare I could barely count on the fingers of one hand individuals the like of her: Someone who understood me instinctively, to whom NEVER need apologize or even explain what I thought or said or did, and I reveled in it. A couple hours in her presence left me a blithe spirit--right and light almost birdy--so very rare for a laden, leaden soul, often fired, indicted and dismissed by the rest of the world. 
That afternoon, then I suddenly noted the shadows had grown long, and Jane sat exhausted, barely able to say goodbye. I jumped up and ran off, chastising myself for remaining  too long, dissipating and usurping the force she needed for her own battle, vowing never to return.

Any critical eye realizes grief is half regret--I-should-have. . . I-shouldn't-haves, and this morning I am grieving a woman I knew so well and so little.

Seedy & Scented: Insight to Civil War

What with The True Story of John Yates Beall culminating a year plus of research and preoccupation with the Civil War, I could not resist the Boscobel reenactment this past weekend.
Expected demonstrations of horseshoeing, tent & candle-making, spinning, etc.  None. However, nosing about the encampment of white canvas tents, (historically correct for 1860's and quite handsome) I came upon a woman named Caroline who had been doing  reenactments for 37 years. Everybody else was off at the battle, the weekend's central event, tho' that struck me as mundanely barbaric as picnickers at Manassas coming to the 1st battle of the Civil War.
I mean, would you be really able to eat potato salad and picnic chicken after seeing men shot dead and wounded in an open field?
Regarding my expectations, Caroline replied, "That's why I always do something they would have been doing." She held up a small harp-shaped tool, looping a single thread over itself on the two tines of it.
"A lucet," she explained, "makes a very strong flat cord they used for corsets, to hang or tie anything."
"I suppose there were no women in Civil War encampments."
"Who do you suppose did the laundry and sewing and cooking?" They had sewing machines, but after the blockade couldn't get thread, and handmade was uneven and couldn't be used in them.
"Then there was always the world's oldest profession!" She chuckled, and encouraged me to go to the battle since I confessed to having never seen one.
The "play by play" was interesting and obviously well-researched; the cavalry Hollywood--dark roanish horses no paints, Palominos or sway backs. As I was leaving early, it galloped by.

And I got a whiff of critical insight--the sound of the commradery, the scent of the horses, the creak of their tack may be what modern life is missing. And perhaps barbarity is just a part of the total human mix.