Getting Older and Travel

During the month I am in San Pancho, MX, I will post periodically about travel and getting older. Not that 72 years old is terribly old, but I do notice some differences compared to having traveled at younger ages.

I will not complain or lament the difficulties and changes, but I believe that being aware of the changes helps deal with them and provide for future travel adventures.

First of all, I find it very difficult to "distill my entire life into a suitcase." Even when I bring well chosen, multi use, layered clothing (and not too many pairs of underwear, sox, etc,) there are so anythings that one might need on a moments notice: like a heating pad, my knee brace, and medications for whatever possible.

Yes many of the medications, for example, can be purchased at the location of arrival but for example, if in Mexico and Montezuma suddenly retaliates with his "revenge" getting to the Pharmacy will be difficult when one is wrapped around the toilet.

Also, as one gets older, more prescription medicines are necessary and especially when traveling outside the country you are instructed to bring them in the original bottles and to keep them in your carry on luggage, not in checked baggage.

My sound bite to discuss the suitcase/packing situation: "The older you get, the more you need to pack, and the less you can lift!"

The good part, I guess, is that I look my age, so often people asked if they could help me. The bus drive from the airport to the car rental place helped me get my suitcase on the bus. At the other end, a burley passenger offered to help me get them off the bus.

At the hotel in Fort Worth, an employee coming to work through the parking lot helped me take the luggage out of the rental car and sure enough, another one was passing through when I was leaving the hotel and helped me put the luggage back in. Again at the rental bus, people offered to help.

Getting onto the airplane was easy on the skybridge in Fort Worth, but after landing on the tarmac in Puerto Villarta, we had to walk down outside stairs and once again I was saved by the couple sitting next to me who grabbed my carry ons and took them down the stairs.

Even with careful packing, I was lugging around some 80 lbs of stuff and the difficult of that made me feel even older, dependent, and less able to take care of myself.

As I said, "The older you get, the more you need to pack, and the less you can lift!"

Responsibility

This BLOG is sometimes an essay, sometimes a creative non-fiction piece, sometimes a poem, sometimes an announcement, but also at times ...  a diary.

Haven't written for a while and always feel responsible to post SOMETHING if only to avoid an absence for those of you who faithfully follow it.

As you can imagine, life is CALM when compared to what it was between 2003 when we received Gregory's diagnosis (usually referred to as "our diagnosis") of Dementia, probably Alzheimer's and 2015 when Gregory died on October 4th.

My grief is CALMER and only rears its overwhelming presence periodically, when least expected, like it did this past Valentine's Day. Of all the holidays we celebrate, Valentine's Day is the one to celebrate with the person you most intimately love and call your sweetheart, which is probably why it is a little more difficult to face alone than birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, etc.

I bought Gregory red roses and dark chocolate (which I ate) and had a good cry sitting on the edge of the bed opposite his shrine. Gigi, the cat Gregory called his, came over to comfort me as she usually does when I am upset and that eased the pain.

I have been working on my memoirs again, trying to edit and integrate my five years worth of blog posts (1250 of them) dealing with the middle and end of our journey into the manuscript which I wrote previously about our early years living with the disease.

You can imagine that at times, at the end of a writing session, I am raw having lived once again through difficult as well as joyful times during Gregory and my journey.

The times that make me the saddest are when Gregory was upset by the limitations and losses he was facing and there was nothing I could do to help. "I only want to go back," he once said, leaving the details to his inability to any longer use language to communicate.

After a bout of tears after a recent editing session about his sadness and my feeling so helpless, I talked myself through to comfort by understanding that there may not have been anything I could do to change the course of the losses; but I was able to do a lot anyway.

I was there for him to hold his hand, hug him and cry together, make his life a little easier by taking most of the responsibility off his shoulders, and simplify his life while at the same time creating an invigorating, fun filled, good eating, safe environment for him.

We are working already on the "Second Annual MORE THAN EVER EDUCATION FUND Luncheon" that will take place on May 3 at the Orrington Hilton in Evanston. There have been several lunch meetings with La Casa Norte as we plan and work to get sponsors, raffle prize donations, and guests to attend the function have begun in earnest.

Last year we raised over $59,000 from +150 guests at the Inaugural Luncheon, awarded 10 scholarships so far (with more anticipated by the second luncheon,) and had our first annual Holiday Cohort Luncheon so the students could have yet another opportunity to be celebrated!

You will be getting a "HOLD THE DATE" announcement here, on Facebook, and/or in an e-mail blast soon as well as an invitation in the mail (if I have your address.) I sincerely hope you can join us. 

During the event, guests will learn more about the work of La Casa Norte and hear a brief presentation from me as well as from our youth participants. There will be a guest speaker; Carmita Vaughn, Founder and President of the Surge Institute, bringing “light” to education for underserved youth. 

The First Annual Gregory Maire Leadership Award will be presented to The North Shore Exchange of Glencoe, Illinois, for their commitment to and work with La Casa Norte and the Youth in College Program. A delicious lunch will be served

Winter 2017 has been fairly easy. Learning how to understand, deal with, and take stands on the foolishness of our new president ("Not My President") has been fairly difficult. We will prevail.

So far, the documentary Alzheimer's: A Love Story has been invited to be part of over 75 film festivals around the world and earned over 35 awards, the most prestigious of which were two from the American Pavillion at the Cannes Film Festival in France and a €1,000 award from the Florence Film Festival. The documentary is now available to rent and stream on Amazon.com and Vimeo.com.

I have been invited to speak at a number of functions, with the documentary as a feature, including the North Shore University Health Care System's Symposium on Dementia, the Methodist Church of Western Springs, the University of Chicago Lab Middle School, and the Sherman Plaza Book Club and Social Committee.

Recently I was the featured speaker for the DAI (Dementia Alliance International) Webinar which included over 50 participants, via the internet, from around the world! My comments will be available shortly on YouTube.

I am currently working on possible collection additions to Michael's Museum: A Curious Collection of Tiny Treasures, a permanent exhibit since May 2011 at Chicago Children's Museum on Navy Pier.

I traveled to visit family in TX and then on to Mexico for three weeks and am looking forward to officiating at the wedding of God Daughter Whitney who lives in Washington, D.C.

My condo and two cats continue to give me great comfort, I continue to go see opera and theater, eat out or "assemble" rather than cook like I used to when Gregory was living at home, visit with friends, and write. So all in all life is good, and I am happy that you are part of it with me!

Shakespeare and Company

I have wonderful memories of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Besides the ambience of the downstairs book store, the upstairs was amazing. One had to climb a narrow staircase fitted between sagging shelves loaded with books. You could almost miss the stair and felt like you were taking a risk to ascend it.

There was a single bed at the top of the stairs covered with a tucked in red wool blanket. A large purring cat was nestled in the center of the well used mattress. On the wall over the bed was a bulletin board where thousands of notes written on scraps of paper were tacked into overlapping layers ... thank yous to the shop from grateful visitors who were in one way or another helped by or impressed with the amazing book store. 

In the next room, besides the book lined, sagging shelves, was a young woman fast asleep on another twin bed with her backpack as a pillow. You could sense how newly arrived in Paris she was and how secure she felt in that safe place. A glass milk bottle was keeping refrigerated outside the window on a ledge between two buildings. 

In yet another room was a freezer chest sized cardboard box set on its side with a desk, chair, and typewriter in place inside. Someone was actually sitting in the box typing something. The rest of that room was filled with people involved in various tasks seated on overstuffed chairs and sofas, feet on coffee tables, coffee mugs on lamped side tables. 

It was based on that magical experience that Gregory and I realized how much we had missed by not running away from home in our youth to discover who we were or might have become in the Paris setting.

Thin Places

Thanks to friend Roger for the heads up on this article:

Thin Places, Where We Are Jolted Out of Old Ways of Seeing the World - NYTimes.com 3/13/12 11:59 PM

March 9, 2012

Where Heaven and Earth Come

Closer

By ERIC WEINER

TRAVEL, like life, is best understood backward but must be experienced forward, to paraphrase Kierkegaard. After decades of wandering, only now does a pattern emerge. I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places.

It is, admittedly, an odd term. One could be forgiven for thinking that thin places describe skinny nations (see Chile) or perhaps cities populated by thin people (see Los Angeles). No, thin places are much deeper than that. They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.

Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel.

It’s not clear who first uttered the term “thin places,” but they almost certainly spoke with an Irish brogue. The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona (now part of Scotland) or the rocky peaks of Croagh Patrick. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.

So what exactly makes a place thin? It’s easier to say what a thin place is not. A thin place is not necessarily a tranquil place, or a fun one, or even a beautiful one, though it may be all of those things too. Disney World is not a thin place. Nor is Cancún. Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.

Thin places are often sacred ones —St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul — but they need not be, at least not conventionally so. A park or even a city square can be a thin place. So can an airport. I love airports. I love their self-contained, hermetic quality, and the way they make me feel that I am floating, suspended between coming and going. One of my favorites is Hong Kong International, a marvel of aesthetics and efficiency. I could spend hours — days! — perched on its mezzanine deck, watching life unfold below. Kennedy Airport, on the other hand, is, for the most part, a thick place. Spread out over eight terminals, there is no center of gravity, nothing to hold on to. (Nor is there anything the least bit transcendent about a T.S.A. security line.)

A bar can be a thin place, too. A while ago, I stumbled across a very thin bar, tucked away in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo. Like many such establishments, this one was tiny — with only four seats and about as big as a large bathroom — but it inspired cathedral awe. The polished wood was dark and smooth; the row of single malts were illuminated in such a way that they glowed. Using a chisel, the bartender manifested — there is no other word for it — ice cubes that rose to the level of art. The place was so comfortable in its own skin, so at home with its own nature — its “suchness,” the Buddhists would put it — that I couldn’t help but feel the same way.

Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar, would understand what I experienced in that Tokyo bar. Writing in his classic work “The Sacred and the Profane,” he observed that “some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” An Apache proverb takes that idea a step further: “Wisdom sits in places.”

The question, of course, is which places? And how do we get there? You don’t plan a trip to a thin place; you stumble upon one. But there are steps you can take to increase the odds of an encounter with thinness. For starters, have no expectations. Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expectations, which explains why so many “spiritual journeys” disappoint. And don’t count on guidebooks — or even friends — to pinpoint your thin places. To some extent, thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way: One person’s thin place is another’s thick one.

Getting to a thin place usually requires a bit of sweat. One does not typically hop a taxi to a thin place, but sometimes you can. That’s how my 7-year-old daughter and I got to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Video camera in hand, she paused at each statue of the various saints, marveling, in a hushed voice, at their poses and headgear.

She was with me, too at the Bangla Sahib gurdwara, a Sikh temple in New Delhi. The temple owes its thinness, in part, to the contrasting thickness amassed outside its gates: the press of humanity, the freestyle traffic, the unrelenting noise and, in general, the controlled anarchy that is urban India. We stepped inside the gates of the gurdwara and into another world. The mesmerizing sound of a harmonium wafted across a reflecting pool. The white marble felt cool on my bare feet. The temple compound was not devoid of people, but this was a different sort of crowd. Everyone walked to the edge of the water, drawn by something unspoken, lost in their solitary worlds, together.

At the gurdwara, time burst its banks. I was awash in time. That’s a common reaction to a thin place. It’s not that we lose all sense of time but, rather, that our relationship with time is altered, softened. In thin places, time is not something we feel compelled to parse or hoard. There’s plenty of it to go around.

Not all sacred places, though, are thin. Freighted with history, and our outsized expectations, they collapse under the weight of their own sacredness, and possess all the divinity of a Greyhound bus station. For me, Jerusalem is one of these places. I find the air so thick with animosity, so heavy with the weight of historical grievances, that any thinness lurking beneath the surface doesn’t stand a chance. Walking through the walled Old City, with its four segregated quarters, I feel my muscles tense. (By contrast, I breathe easier in supposedly godless Tel Aviv.)

Thankfully, Rumi’s tomb, in Turkey, has not met such a fate. It is very much alive. People from around the Muslim (and non-Muslim) world visit the tomb, in the central Turkish city of Konya, to pay homage to Islam’s poet laureate. Rumi’s coffin is draped in a green carpet, with a cylindrical black hat, the kind worn by dervishes, sitting atop. His 13th-century poems brim with an ecstatic love of Allah, and his resting place reflects that. People are encouraged to linger. Some curl up in a corner, reading Rumi. Others lose themselves in silent prayer. I noticed one woman, hand over heart, walking slowly on the carpeted floor, tears of joy streaming down her cheeks.

Perhaps the thinnest of places is Boudhanath, in Nepal. Despite the fact that it has been swallowed up by Katmandu, Boudha, as many call it, retains the self-contained coziness of the village that it is. Life there revolves, literally, around a giant white stupa, or Buddhist shrine. At any time of the day, hundreds of people circumambulate the stupa, chanting mantras, kneading their mala beads and twirling prayer wheels. I woke in Boudha each morning at dawn and marveled at the light, milky and soft, as well as the sounds: the clicketyclack of prayer wheels, the murmur of mantras, the clanking of store shutters yanked open, the chortle of spoken Tibetan. A few dozen monasteries have sprung up around the stupa. And then there are restaurants where you can sip a decent pinot noir while gazing into the All-Seeing Eyes of Buddha. It is a rare and wonderful confluence of the sacred and the profane.

Many thin places are wild, untamed, but cities can also be surprisingly thin. The world’s first urban centers, in Mesopotamia, were erected not as places of commerce or empire but, rather, so inhabitants could consort with the gods. What better place to marvel at the glory of God and his handiwork (via his subcontractors: us) than on the Bund in Shanghai, with the Jetsons-like skyscrapers towering above, or at Montmartre in Paris, with the city’s Gothic glory revealed below.

Bookstores are thin places, too, and, for me, none is thinner than Powell’s in Portland, Ore. Sure, there are grander bookstores, and older ones, but none quite possesses Powell’s mix of order and serendipity, especially in its used-book collection — Chekhov happily cohabitating with “Personal Finance for Dummies,” Balzac snuggling with Grisham.

Yet, ultimately, an inherent contradiction trips up any spiritual walkabout: The divine supposedly transcends time and space, yet we seek it in very specific places and at very specific times. If God (however defined) is everywhere and “everywhen,” as the Australian aboriginals put it so wonderfully, then why are some places thin and others not? Why isn’t the whole world thin?

Maybe it is but we’re too thick to recognize it. Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven but of earth as it really is, unencumbered. Unmasked.

ERIC WEINER is author, most recently, of “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine.” .

Casa de los Arcos Review

We have been going to Puerto Vallarta and staying at Casa de los Arcos for over six years. Arriving at Casa de los Arcos is like coming HOME and is a magical, romantic, comfortable, clean, reasonably priced place to stay. The owners and staff are friendly and accommodating (we love them!) A fifteen minute walk down the mountain or a cheap cab gets you to and from the old town where "all the action is" but when at the house your time becomes a quiet and restful retreat with a wonderful view of Banderas Bay. Best of all worlds. PV itself is a safe, friendly place to visit, go to the beach, dine, play, shop, "do the boardwalk" and find most any kind of adventure you are looking for. Casa de los Arcos provides a great place to sleep, read, rest, cook at home, swim in the pool, sun, visit and if you want to (sometimes) get on the internet to check up on business. Highly, highly recommended.

YOU MIGHT WANT TO VISIT THEIR SITE

Casa de los Arcos