Final thoughts on Sedona

On our last morning I wanted to do a short walk. So I climbed the steps to go for a walk around town. This area is called Upper Sedona, I suppose based on elevation. I do not believe that there is a Lower Sedona and I'm not even sure about just plain old Sedona, but no matter.

Upper Sedona consists entirely of tourist restaurants and souvenir shops. It's amazing to see such a concentration of similar stores. You think there would be some differentiation. You can almost imagine the frame of mind of somebody doing this. "I'm going to open a store in Sedona that doesn't sell junk." Then, of course, once you open the store, you're completely driven by what's sells. The junk sells. So that's what you sell. Unless, of course, you have an idea for a store that sells jewelry. And jerky. And flutes. 

There's also a thriving commercial spirituality industry here. At any number of places you can get psychic consultations and aura readings. Most of them will photograph your aura for you. I would like one of those cameras. They will also take you out to tour the vortexes. Supposedly, the Sedona area is rich with swirling energy fields that can have life-altering benefits. I do kind of feel the need to explore the whole vortex thing. I feel like I can do it with an open mind. I figure receiving energy from the vortex might be like putting your Bluetooth device into discoverable mode. If my phone can do that, why not me? And I haven't any knowledge about their existence, one way or the other. Just the fact that it wouldn't be the first thing I would think about when I landed the spot, doesn't mean it isn't there. 

Fortunately, they seem to have not corrupted all of the natural beauty here for commercial purposes. You need trails and such to really access some places, but they haven't ruined anything in the process. There doesn't seem to be any building of any sort on public lands around here and so hikers, jeeps and bicycles and I presume folks on ATVs as well can use it and enjoy it. I can certainly see finding a place a few miles outside of the busyness to settle down, if you're into this kind of thing.

Some of it is just commercial, some of it was just fun, some stupid, but the beauty is absolutely real. And I'm okay with all that. And I think you can enjoy this place without being completely enamored of all things red rocked.

We did stop by Bell Rock, one of the famed vortexes on the way out of town. The description on line clearly said that you could feel the energy as soon as you got out of your car, so we felt no need to hike up to Bell Rock itself. It's a nice enough looking rock.

Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to feel the energy (sort of like forgetting to put your Bluetooth phone into 'discoverable' mode, I'd imagine), but I felt nothing. Oh well. It was a nice easy trip home, so maybe that was the energy somehow.

The one full day in Sedona

Whenever we go to a new place I like to go for a walk and see where we are. Today I didn't want to just screw around, because we're probably 150 feet down from street level and at 4000 feet, so I didn't want to exhaust myself just getting to wherever I was going to walk. So I asked the concierge at the hotel. he showed me a map, told me how to get up the hill by stairs and "just go up this street and there's a nice trail at the end."

I'm sure he's right. But he didn't mention that the end of the street, which looked like a couple of blocks on the map, was in fact a mile away, uphill. By the time I got to the trail head, it was time to turn around. I did go onto the trail for about 3 minutes, and it was quite beautiful, but that was the extent of it.

After that we had breakfast and departed on a Pink Jeep Tour. Not sure what the origin of that is, but everyone knows about Pink Jeep Tours. There are a bunch of trails through public lands that are dedicated to jeep and ATV driving. They're bumpy and steep at times, but they take you out into the middle of stuff you wouldn't be able to get close to otherwise. The rocks here are really quite amazing. Mostly reddish, but with striations of grey as well. The erosion patterns are very cool. It must be a great place for rock climbing and mountain biking. 

Our guide was a 40-ish guy who did no dumb cutesy shtick, for which we were very greatful. In the jeep with us were 3 little girls, aged 2-4, who giggled throughout the trip. They had a great time and were very cute. Their adult companions, not so cute and a bit annoying at times, but it was all in all a lot of fun. We will see how my back feels tomorrow after all that bouncing around.

That was pretty much it for activity for the day. We had lunch at the edge of town, having gotten a ride up to the top of the driveway, but still having to climb everywhere we went. The town is at 4500 feet- not extreme altitude, but still noticeable altitude, so that was no particular fun. But we got through it and were able to get back to the hotel by stairs, which were okay for going down.

After that, it was time for our spa treatments, which we got down by the stream in a tent. This was quite pleasant, especially the absence of the spa music. Who makes up that stuff? It's awful. I had told them that I didn't care whether I had a male or female therapist, so they assigned me someone where it was impossible to know the difference. It was a little disconcerting, to be honest. Not the most obvious choice for deep tissue work, but it was fine.

We then sat and relaxed until dinner, which was pizza at a cute little place about 5 miles out of town. Not too bad for the middle of Arizona. Then back and to bed. Home tomorrow.

Scottsdale to Sedona

We left Scottsdale around noon. The morning was more of the same- quiet, followed by a flurry of activity, as we went from it being just me, then me and Ronnie, then everyone and breakfast and the daughter having to leave back for college but not without raiding the refrigerator and supply closet for food and paper towels and the like. We left at pretty much the same time and headed north towards Sedona. I was sorry that we didn't take the scenic route, though parts of the way we came were nice. The highlight was when we passed a sign that read, "Entering Prescott National Forest" at a time that there was not a single tree anywhere in sight. Arizona can be like that.

Sedona has plenty of trees. It's in an area called Verde Valley, and it's certainly more verde than where we'd been. There's a large creek (I know that sounds like an oxymoron but it's big enough to be shown on maps) that runs through the center of it, which made it a major agricultural area before rising real estate prices drove the farmers out. Now they harvest tourists, here to see the red rocks and experience the energy fields. We haven't visited any of they vortexes (vortices, anyone?) but we might on our way out of town. Supposedly there's swirling energy coming out of the earth in a few places.

I'm not sure what gives, but it's plenty scenic here. This is the view from our hotel room balcony if you bend uncomfortably and look in the right directions (hey, better than nothing).

The hotel we're staying at, (I make good English, eh?) is called L'Auberge. I don't know what an auberge is and am too lazy to look it up. But it's a nice little place right on the stream, 80 rooms or so, a kind of cross between a luxury resort and a summer camp. It's got a great spa (by reputation and based on what I had done to me) and a terrific restaurant (again, based both on reputation and experience).

The town itself looks kind of iffy. Tough to see anything there except for t-shirt shops, tour operators, crystal vendors and frozen yogurt places. And very busy and crowded. The hotel is just down the hill from the town but is very quiet and pleasant.

We had a great dinner and then completely crashed right afterwards. Out hosts in Scottsdale are late night people, which we are too, but we did not want to get switched over to Pacific time. We'd been eating dinner at 9, which is midnight eastern. Here, we ate at 8. Best we could do. But asleep by 11, thank goodness. Tomorrow will be time to visit the area and maybe venture into town.

Life in the desert

It's now Sunday morning, Easter Sunday for those who keep track of such things. We had a very long, fun day yesterday.

Once everyone was up and around, we went for a hike on the Sunrise Trail in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. I remember that at one time my friends found me kind of annoying because I was always trying to cover every possible eventuality, but they (the ones who are still my friends anyway) came to appreciate that I was doing it for the collective benefit, not just to suit myself. So went the leaving-the-house process. Our host was convinced that a certain level of sun protection and hydration was required and would not let us leave until we had outfitted ourselves properly. The amount of cajoling and suggesting was truly remarkable, and it took forever to get going, but once we did we were certainly well prepared.

The hike, from one side of a mountain to the other, with optional spur trail up to the peak, was quite a bit harder that we'd been led to believe, and Ronnie smartly cut her part of it short, splitting us into two pairs. I carried on because I wanted to see it and how hard could it be anyway? The short answer, quite hard indeed. It took me and my friend 2 1/2 hours to complete the 5 mile trek. On a regular walk for me, 5 miles is about half that. Uphill was increasingly (though never overwhelmingly) steep and unrelenting, and downhill was more somewhat easier but still treacherous in spots, but the view from the top was pretty great.

Got back, showered, and then ventured out to our hosts' new house, which is in progress for eventual move-in. We had some wine and cheese and hung out in the backyard. Our friends here are genuinely warm and loving people, and it's been very easy to reconnect with them. I hope they are finding this as positive as Ronnie and I are.

After that, we did a couple of pick-ups and drop-offs of kids, raised a fuss in a Starbucks, and visited our friend's place of business. This guy was a pharmacist who wanted to get out of the business of either running his own store or working for a chain store, so he and a colleague opened a veterinary practice, specializing in custom medications for animals large and small. They caught a wave of consumer interest in such stuff and it's now a large enterprise employing 85 people shipping hundreds of prescriptions all over the country every day. We got to see the whole operation, from where orders were taken through putting the medicine in capsules or forming it into tablets through shipping. Two stories packed with desks and equipment.

From there, we went to something even more remarkable, an installation at the Desert Botanical Garden where glass sculptures by somebody named Chihuly were integrated into the native plants- mostly cacti but some desert trees as well. It's pretty indescribable, so here are some photos.

Insane, beautiful stuff. I've never seen anything like it. I'm sure it's beautiful during the day as well, but at night it was wonderfully surreal. On top of that, the Garden was mobbed. Well, maybe that's an overstatement. It was crowded. Every inch of it was crowded at 9PM on a Saturday night. It seems like an opportunity to snidely comment on the nightlife options in Phoenix, but I'm not so sure. It was a real not-to-be-missed experience. The place stays open until midnight on Friday and Saturday nights and there are kiosks selling wine and beer and margaritas in flashing illuminated cups. Wow.

From there to a Mexican restaurant for a late (9:45 PDT) dinner, featuring blackened tuna tacos and a blood orange margarita, and then home and immediately to bed. What a day!

Back from spring break

Not me but the blog is back.

I'm aware that I could have continued to write while I was on break, but I just didn't feel like it. I'd say that I've been neither busy nor lazy. I graded all the tests I had sitting around, some for a few weeks, got enough of my taxes done to file an extension, eliminated a decent chunk of the paper that besieges me on a daily basis, went to a couple of ballgames, did a Seder, all that kind of stuff. But the break had no flow to it because various scheduling things chopped it to bits, and having a day taken away at the end didn't help.

But now I'm sitting in a friend's backyard in Scottsdale, looking down at a pool and up at a mountain.

This trip is a follow-up to our Bat Mitzvah visit back in February. Because we enjoyed visiting with the friends whose kid was celebrating, we decided to come back here when we had a moment. And five days seemed like enough, even with travel soaking up one of them.

These folks are Ronnie's friends from high school, who I met only a few weeks after I met Ronnie. And I've always enjoyed their company and they mine. So why not? 

The flight here was the usual flight crap- stuffed into little seats with virtually no service of any kind, rationing whatever snacks we could find in the incredibly bereft Terminal A at PHL and smuggled on board, and trying to read/sleep our way through 5 hours. We made it. That's the best I can say.

These folks live near the end of the road, on a cul-de-sac where the edge of Scottsdale bumps up against some hills. It's really hard to drive around here and understand why a huge sprawling metropolitan area sprung up here. Certainly nothing else springs up here without great difficulty. I'll try to get pictures of a couple of things to give you an idea, but aside from the apparent law requiring all buildings to be squat and adobe-style, there a lots of places that really look like they've been plopped down where they are simply because there was open space. Maybe that's what actually happened. So you get commercial buildings with nothing but flat desert on 3 or even 4 sides of them. It's just kind of weird.

I don't begrudge people living here, though I'm not sure what they'll do when they run out of water. And we got to go to a cool place for dinner, an old bar called Greasewood Flat. It's in an old junkyard, and had old mining equipment lying around, plus some animals and a well-used horseshoes, well, what do you call a place where you play horseshoes? A court? A field? A course? It's none of those. I'll call it a pitch, which is really the word for a soccer field, but that's what you do with horseshoes, I think. They have burgers and beer and live music and fire pits. They even made a matzah grilled cheese. And of course it looks like it's in the middle of nowhere, even though it's across the road from the Four Seasons.

So our trip is off to a good start. I'll keep y'all posted.

Was that only 100 years? It seemed so short.

It started out like any other catered party- tents and piles of food and young men and women in black scurrying around with plates of things and drinks. But it didn't really stay that way, because this was my uncle Mike's 100th birthday party, and he was going to do it his own way, thank you.

I should say from the start that I lack the writing ability to really capture this, but I'll give it my best shot. The party started at 1, and I decided that I'd take lots of pictures, so I ran around checking things out, while spending some time talking to my cousins. That's what I really came for, and in many ways, hanging out and talking was my favorite part of this. But then around 2:30 they moved the food back and out of the way, and in came these people.

Yes, those are Tongan dancers, ladies and gentlemen, and here's a small taste of what they did.

Now you may be saying. "Of course, what hundred year-old retired school teacher doesn't have 30-plus Tongan dancers performing at their birthday party?" Or possibly you would not be saying anything of the sort. More likely, you'd be saying something like "Wow!" or maybe "WTF?" or both. I was agape. I knew there would be a Tongan performance- my cousin Michael spent a long time as a seminarian in Tonga and has been accepted into the community as a brother. But this was only the beginning of 20+ minutes of dances and songs honoring my uncle, who was just sitting there. soaking it all in.

After a series of songs, they turned the microphone over to Mike himself. My uncle is a poet, and his part was funny and poignant and lyrical. The key passage was his recipe for longevity, which began "Invest in bonds," which got a bit of a laugh, until be began to expound on the kind of bonds he was talking about. Bonds of friendship and family, love and devotion. It was quite beautiful really, even for a cynical city boy like me, because of its simple truth.

After that, the food service returned and people ate and talked and laughed. It was a collection of people the Mike had worked with, lived near, played poker with, fished and hunted with (his house is the only place I've ever had to pick shotgun pellets out of my dinner) and otherwise touched. This was an elementary school principal so beloved that they named the school after him. And we all had a champagne toast and a swan-shaped cream puff.

And then, almost magically, it was back to family time. The assembled multitudes trickled out and it was just us family and my younger cousins' (my first cousin's 20-something daughters, whom I've been told are first cousins, once removed. That sounds like a completely made up thing to me) boyfriends. We sat around a big table and drank leftover champagne and wine, took pictures, raided the remaining catered food (sliders!), and gawked at the thousands of old photos loose and in a dozen or so albums on the dining room table. I survived having old awkward photos and naked baby pictures pointed out to me repeatedly and reciprocated in kind. Ronnie snuggled on the couch with my niece and nephew, my niece having gotten ahold of my unlocked phone and replaced my beautiful Lake Placid lock screen with a purposely hideous selfie.

And finally we nudged our way out. Back to the hotel with hundreds of pictures and a host of great memories. I won't let it be as long next time, but if nothing else there's always birthday 105.

The night before the big event

There's a celebration scene near the end of "Roxanne," Steve Martin's funny modern day Cyrano de Bergerac, where the mayor of the town, played by Fred Willard, calls out to the assembled crowd, "I'd rather be with the people in this town, than with the finest people on earth!" And after a moment to digest that mangled thought, everybody cheers.

 

There were moments this past weekend when I felt that way. I had flown out to California for my uncle Mike's 100th birthday party, and was immersed in my extended family. It was a whirlwind kind of visit, showing up late Thursday, spending most of the day on Saturday hanging out at the house in suburban Sacramento that Mike and his wife, my dear departed Aunt Lucille, had built in 1952 and raised my three cousins. These cousins, ranging from 6 months to 4 years younger than me, are the closest extended family I have. My mom and aunt made sure we spent as much time as possible together, even with her in California and us in New York.

 

I was actually a little nervous about going, because I have not been good about keeping in touch the last couple of years. It's been reciprocal, but I blame myself because I know I dislike making phone calls and I don't know what they think. So I made sure to try to call before we came. I did get to speak with one of them for a while, enough to make me feel less nervous.

 

My two "older" cousins are women, hence the quotation marks, and if I have to be completely honest I've been kind of madly in love with both of them since I was 12. And they had taken on the task of creating this event, along with my one guy cousin, who has some interesting connections that enlivened the proceedings.

 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Friday was family-only day, a nice way to warm up for the 150+ expected for the party itself. We really did next to nothing but hang out. It was me and Ronnie, my sister and her kids, my dad, and my cousins and their kids. And it was as warm and joyful as you can imagine a get-together the night before a huge event could be. In spite of one cousin checking every weather report available to make sure that Saturday would be nice (accuweather said 'delightful,' while the Weather channel said only 'pleasant.'), the other making sure the house was in order and the third working on the next day's program, everybody was able to relax a bit, watch baseball, drink beer and eat pizza. And laugh. A lot.

 

And speaking of relax, I know it only comes up as a typo, but I think 'relaz' is a far better word for it. That final x is too percussive don't you think?

 

Since one of my themes for my second adulthood, as Ronnie calls our empty-nestishness, is to be closer with the people I really care about, this seemed as perfect an evening as I could have hoped for when we planned the trip. And yeah, I'll take these people anytime, wherever they rank on the fineness scale.

Wouldn't want to live there, but it's a nice place.

Well that's more like it. This morning I'm walking on a different bike path, this one along the American River. The air is cool and the sun is bright and it's absolutely spectacularly beautiful. The pictures don't do it justice.

I'm feeling good today. Yesterday was a wonderful day, hanging out with my family in a house that I've visited enough times to feel at home, drinking beer, watching baseball, catching up. It really reminds you of what's really important.

Honestly, I try to treat everything I do as important. What's the point of doing it otherwise. It's a big part of my life philosophy, to leave every situation I encounter better than the way I found it. But there's a big difference between momentary importance and lasting importance.

To be in a place that's not my home where I feel so completely at home is well, almost literally transporting. I think I mentioned I tend to divide places in two places I could live in places I could not. This is a place I could not live. It's just not my kind of scene. But I can tell you that being here makes me as happy as I feel anywhere in the world.

Kid stuff

I spend a lot of time with people's kids. I guess that doesn't narrow the population down at all, but I mean I get to know a lot people without ever meeting them, because I get to spend time with their kids. You can learn a lot about someone by getting to know what kinds of kids they created.

Creating a kid combines both nature and nurture, and one of the things that I enjoy about meeting parents during conferences is getting the answer to "Where did that come from?" It's certainly not an exact science, but if I see a kid that I really like, chances are good that I'm going to like their parents too.

This brings me back to my cousins, who I am visiting this weekend. This is really the only extended family that I have. I have cousins on the other side of my family, but I was never close with them, though I'm very fond of my uncle on that side. But these cousins are special to me, and I've always felt like they were quality people, good-hearted people. And this weekend I'm getting a renewed opportunity to get to know their kids, and I've gotta say, it's confirmed everything I thought.

I don't feel comfortable about going into more detail, because I've made a policy of not writing about other people. It feels like an invasion of privacy and this blog is specifically about me, it's not a 3rd person thing, but I'm comfortable saying that these "kids" (they range from late teens to mid 20's) are spectacular. They are a credit to their parents, just as their parents are a credit to them. I hope people feel the same thing when they meet my kids.

Birthday greetings from California

Currently in Sacramento. Actually in the Sacramento suburbs, which believe you me are almost has hoppin' as Sacramento itself. We're staying in a place called Rancho Cordova. I don't know where that name came from- there are no ranchos anywhere and it doesn't look anything like Cordova. It's strip malls and chain hotels. I'm guessing there are corporate offices around somewhere- those usually attract clumps of chain hotels, but I haven't seen them. And to give you an idea of how attractive it is, here's a picture of the bike path that I went talking on this morning.

What you can't see in that picture is that the side of the bike path is littered with dozens of little airline bottles of cheap whisky and empty cat food containers.

The second nicest feature of this area is the American River, which runs from Folsom Dam (yes, there's a prison there as well) down through town and then somewhere- I don't know, maybe to the Pacific, which is about 100 miles from here. When I was a teenager I was here and got in trouble for getting stoned with my cousin's soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend while floating down that river. Now, 40 years later, it's a place for a pretty, peaceful walk.

But the nicest feature of this area is my family that lives in the vicinity. I'm here for my Uncle Mike's 100th birthday party. His kids and their kids, my cousins here, are among the people dearest to me. So there's a part of being here that feels like home.

Tomorrow there's a big hoo-hah, with 150 people coming, eating catered food and toasting Uncle Mike. But tonight, it's pizza with family, and I'll take that anytime.

Last weekend, home alone

I'm currently on my way to New York pick up my wife, watch my daughter singing a concert, and then head back home. I been home alone and Thursday, three days ago. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm okay alone. I don't get lonely, I don't get bored, I don't get bummed out. I'm perfectly happy just to be.

But I'm generally not alone. I have a wife and kids and I have a life that revolves around them. So then what do I do when I'm all alone? Well, I'm a guy, so I drink a lot of beer, make a mess and leave the toilet seat up. Well, no. The difference between being an adult guy and a kid guy is you think about what's going happen tomorrow.

My wife likes a tidy house. I'm not a tidy person, but I like tidy house pretty well too. I'm just not a person who keep things tidy on an ongoing basis. This requires periodic cleanup. Like this morning, I had a whole list of things to do before left the house. 

I put dishes away, I put papers in a pile on the dining room table, I recycle newspapers and beer bottles. Yes, I did drink some beer. But that's not really unusual anyway. I hung up coats, put the dry cleaning the closet, wiped down the countertop, like down another, put all of my reading glasses in a pile, actually a Negro. Sorry, I'm doing this on the road by speaking into my phone and I'm actually putting my reading glasses in a neat row.

Why did I do all this? I love my wife of course, and in a two-person household, life is better when both people are happy. And the neat house make my wife happy, as I said. Perhaps even more importantly, that somebody gave the thought to making the house neat feels good for her, as it would for anyone in that position. The one thing I didn't have to do with the toilet down. I've been living in household girls long enough that I never leave the toilet seat up anyway. This is a different philosophy than my friend Mike, who also lives in a house full girls, and who regularly leave the seat up, "" just to keep them on their toes.