Boomer Randomness

The little party was well underway that Saturday night. My now ex invited some of her dog show friends to a rare get-together at our house. I grilled burgers, chicken and veggies and opened several bottles of wine and attempted to keep up with the conversations, but my mind was twelve hundred miles away and my eyes were on the Weather Channel. A dominant childhood memory growing up in New Orleans was a TV meteorologist named Nash Roberts. He was famous for accurate hurricane forecasts and for years he drew possible storm tracks and informed viewers of their potential impact. One particular track, he said, would flood the entire city. It had never happened. At one point during the party I noticed that the updated Weather Channel storm track prediction for a rapidly intensifying Hurricane Katrina showed that exact path. The rest of the party is a blur because I immediately called my sister to learn where and when she was evacuating. There was no question that she had already foll...

Layers of subdued blues, purples, pinks, yellows and magenta appeared more like a soft rainbow of calm, rolling ocean waves than the sunset sky I was photographing at the rim of the Grand Canyon that September evening in 2000.  That moment was one of many jaw-dropping experiences during one of my life's most memorable vacations.  Purple mountains majesty indeed.  In my usual overthinking manner, I prepared for the trip in great detail. I was especially proud of my photography research. I had the perfect lenses, film and tripod. I studied my favorite nature photographers John Shaw and David Muench with an eye toward understanding how they captured their awe-inspiring images and was ready to shoot the best sunset and sunrise photos of my life. I was totally unprepared for the overwhelming emotional reaction I had the first time I reached the edge of the North Rim.  Tears. Oh my God. Speechless.   That reaction was repeated multiple times that week, at...

We had our first dinner party with neighborhood friends last weekend and it was a success. Good food, good wine, good conversation. We talked about music, the neighborhood, recipes, how each couple met. One guest read poems from a Robert Frost anthology he spotted on my bookshelf.  And we managed to mostly avoid politics. Guest were from or had lived in New York, Colorado, Oklahoma, the Philippines and India. We all live in the same neighborhood now and know each other as regulars at a local wine bar. After living in this neighborhood for almost four years I am starting to feel connected and that was one of my goals.

MS is a crazy disease, I have it and I hate it. There is no known cause and nothing I could have done at any time in my life to prevent it or predict it. At least that's the current thinking. I just have to accept it. That's the hard part. I am usually a 'half full' optimist, not a 'half empty' pessimist. The emptier my life's hour glass gets the fuller my life gets. It is an intentional life and attitude choice that I preach to others and act on myself. Multiple Sclerosis, however, conspires against me on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. It's a challenge I am barely prepared for. While doing much-belated spring cleaning last week, I discovered some magazine articles I clipped about balance issues ... from 1999. That, combined with other memories and observations from friends, lead me to believe I've had some form of MS for a long time, and not just the five years since my first more obvious symptoms of bad balance and odd numbness and the fift...

  After nearly four years of living on my own and spending thousands of dollars in attorney fees, I am still not divorced and the issues are still not settled. I am a patient man but not this patient. A year after being on my own again I met the most incredible woman. She is now the love of my life. We laugh, cry, love, dance, talk, cook, share life.   We will be together the rest of our lives.   I am not delusional about her; everyone who knows us agrees that we are meant to be.   Yet because things are still not officially settled, I am still not supposed to be public about it. Even saying this here, in a blog that is relatively anonymous but still public, is a risk. And that sucks. How dare somebody tell me how to live or who to love. My patience is running out.

I'm a healthy, reasonably fit, ok looking, heterosexual man. Most of my close friends are women. Most of them have never been my lovers. Is that really so unusual?  Can men and women be close friends without having sex? One of my closest friends lives several hundred miles away and visited me this week. I introduced her to several local peeps at my neighborhood hangout and a common question was 'where did you meet?'  The answer raised eyebrows every time. We met online. No, not on a dating site but through this blog and her blog. Oh sure, they said or implied.  A 'blog'. Wink wink. And you visit each other and just hang out? Wine, music, photography, laughter and that's all? No, uhh, you know? No. Really. You mean there's never been any attraction?  I didn't say that. But we decided early on that this would be a platonic friendship. We don't have sex, we don't make out, we don't hold hands walking down the street. We've n...