Month: February 2021

I no longer enjoy flying.  I’m not exactly sure when I came to this conclusion.  It might have been the prop engine flight from Duluth to Minneapolis that was piloted by two kids who could not have been over 18 years old and spoke only fluent Canadian.  We had not been in the air for more than 30 seconds when I was searching for the barf bag in the pocket of the seat in front of me.  Might have used it too but someone had been ahead of me in that department.  That plane bounced and juggled and damn near landed on its right-wing tip.  The seats were hard plastic with dual slits in the bottom which I assume that they were there to facilitate the removal of human excrement.  My memory may be a little fuzzy but I swear that the cockpit door was a shower curtain.

My love of flying might also have left me when I realized that stewardesses were no longer the sexy things of my youth.  It is hard to believe now but at one time that job was glamorous and filled with young and sexy women who eventually became trophy wives of sports heroes, rich doctors and the captains of industry.  Today she is just a frazzled middle aged women who pushes the beverage cart and charges three bucks for a snack-size bag of peanuts or five bucks for a Bud Light.  Didn’t they use to provide you with real food?  I know that people use to complain all the time about airline food, but I never did.  I usually traveled on per diem and a free meal meant that was one less I had to buy and more money I could bring home for Judy to buy shoes.  I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a snack bag on a three-hour flight.  So I get my complimentary half a coke in twice as much ice as needed to make it seem larger than it is, and hope that I won’t spill it on my shirt when the flying waitress who is sneaking up behind me with yet another cart full of overpriced snacks hits my shoulder.  

But I could live with all that shit if the seats were comfortable.  At first, I put it off to growing older but I have lately become convinced that they are cramming you into increasing smaller seats and at a time when there is a growing obesity epidemic in America.  And the quality of passengers who are shoehorned in the seats next to me has gotten worse as well.  I am not sure who was worse, the woman from West Africa who was constantly yelling at her kid in some language that sounded like a cross between a cat in heat and fingernails on a chalk board or the too-much-after-shave guy in the seat in front of me who moved his seat back and into my face with his greasy hair now an inch from my nose while he talks and talks trying to make some chick he just met, who seems to be interested in this sleaze bag.  Oh My God!

Sure flying gets me there quicker than driving an RV, but I hate the trips and by the time I am over jet lag, it’s time to fly the hellish skies back home.  After I retired my flying days were pretty much over.  But before that the only way to visit my son Marty and family was to bite the horse’s ass, as the Navy decided whether he lived in Bahrain, New York or Washington DC and there is now no practical way to visit them in the vacation time allowed other than to fly. 

It might be different if Marty was some boring character or if his wife, Nikki, was some foul-mouthed bitch who treated the grandkids like shit.  I would make excuses not to go.  But when he sends you an EMAIL with the video of the darlings begging us to come for Christmas or just because they miss us, the distress of long flights sitting next to a nasty fat ass with BO seems trivial.

Getting to the airport from Waldport is no easy task.  It is three and half hours to Portland in light traffic.  Given that you are now supposed to arrive two hours before your flight and the quickest flights are at 7AM, you do the math.  When we finally arrive at the airport we get to stand in line for the mandatory carry on and body cavity searches.  When I get to the x-ray machine, they further piss me off by making me take off my shoes and belt.  As I have no ass, I am now stumbling though the metal detector trying to hold up pants with one hand when the fucking alarm goes off. 

“Sir, please move over here and put your arms out straight” says the dull eyed guy in his spiffy new TSA uniform as he pulls out his light saber and begins to wave it over my body.  Lucky for me that it is not a real light saber as he jabs me in the nards.  Can’t really blame him for it, as I had to let go of my pants to put my arms out, which is when they fell down to my ankles, which distracted him from his very important national security related task of strip searching a middle-aged fat guy for weapons of mass destruction. Which by the way would be great name for a rock band.

After that humiliation we wait for another half an hour while they board the plane with little kids, the lame and of course the first-class passengers who paid triple so they can show off their comfy seats to the peasants who are forced to parade by them with heads bowed in supplication.  They think they’re so special.  “Look at me! Look at me! I have more money than you do”.  I on the other hand are tired, pissed off, hung over and even after having gotten up at 3 AM so I can make this friggin’ flight I know that I will not be able to nap as something always prevents it.  I try to catch their eyes as I file past these snobs so that they can see my crazed homicidal look.  But they are too busy with their laptops and their air mall magazines, so I intentionally bump them with my carry on as I go past.

When Judy and I finally get to our seats they are occupied with an orthodox Jewish couple and their kids, one of which is an infant.  When Judy pointed out that they were sitting in our seats we were tersely informed that we are mistaken. They had paid for and the seats were assigned to them.  Judy and grumpy me were then directed by a flying waitress to stand in the back of the plane with our carry-on luggage as everybody else get seated.  I hear some laughter and wonder if my pants have fallen again. 

Did they oversell the plane?  Are we going to get kicked off the flight, missing our connections and losing a day with Marty and Nikki?  How are we going to get word to them that we are going to be stuck in an airport somewhere in the Midwest?  Maybe I should switch to suspenders?  But the problem turns out not to be the airlines at all.  The “religious” couple only paid for four seats and were trying to take five so as not to have to carry the baby on their laps.  I can understand that and eventually it all got settled.  There was an extra seat and by Judy and me by not sitting next to each other, they got to keep their family together.  Judy and I would have been more than happy to shift seats around if we had been asked.  But how stupid was that for an obviously Jewish couple to pull that one?  Basic rule of thumb here: If you don’t want to be stereotyped, then don’t reinforce the stereotype.  At least take the yarmulke and the utility-doily belt off first if you are going to try and pull a fast one.  For when a person publicly professes their religion be it via statement or dress code, a lot of people, especially me, expect better of them than the regular Joe six packs of this world.  When religious people misbehave, be they Jews, Amish, Baptists or chicken-Shiites they are not just demeaning themselves but their god as well.  It is not something I get particularly angry about, it’s just sad.

Eventually we got to Marty’s.  Had a great time with them at Easter that year, even pulled the ol’ Easter bunny stealing their eggs bit.  Helped Marty fix a few things around his house which is a wonderful old gal in Hagerstown, MA, well worth the hour and a half commute to his duty station.  We had planned to go into DC to spend a day at the Smithsonian, but it kept being put off as either someone was not feeling well or other things like helping Marty make beer (always a worthwhile endeavor) kept getting in the way.  But that’s the way it should be with traveling. 

The best plan is not to plan. That is one of the joys of owning an RV after being retired.  You don’t have to leave on a certain day, and you can take as long as you want to get there and taking as many down days as you like along the way. Such was going to be the case with the long trip across the country we have been thinking about taking for the past three years.  Why not head south in Feb. and come back north in Oct.  after making the grand loop to the east coast and back. That was our non-plan plan for 2020.  Fucking Covid 19.  Maybe we can go in 2022 if we are still on this side of the sod.

Tucson is a strange city.  In the winter it fills up full of seniors who seem to spend a lot of time playing miniature golf as the town is loaded with these micro-links.  Judy and I were too busy to play as LoriAnne, her husband, and Delda were all there.  We crowded into an RV park a few miles from the kids and spent our days that Christmas season visiting and exploring the local attractions with one or more of them.  While attractions like the Air Force graveyard and Air Museum and a National Park dedicated to cactus were well worth the visit, the one that stuck to my ribs was the 17th century Spanish mission San Zavier del Bac.  

From the outside the mission is imposing, earning its nickname as the “White Dove of the Desert”.  The sanctuary was definitely not what I expected.  It was definitely not opulent; I might even call it gaudy and poor.  In retrospect, considering that the mission is located on part of the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation and has served this demographic for centuries, I should not have been so surprised.  There was even a badly worn and poorly done wooden statue of Saint Francis laying in a coffin-like repose and all decorated up with chintzy Christmas tinsel that looked like it had been purchased at a garage sale several years before.   I am certainly not meaning this to be disrespectful.  I have been in lots of churches from Catholic to Pentecostal over the years, but this is the only one where I have actually felt a presence and it was not just me. Judy and the rest of our group all fell silent.  We took no pictures, talked little and then only in whispers.  I am not sure that what I felt was God as it was also not what I expected to feel in his presence as it was sad and old and almost malevolent.  I felt like an interloper sitting in those humble pews which had been used for three hundred years as a place of worship and hope by poor Hispanics and Native Americans.  I didn’t belong there and the ghosts of the tens of thousands that lived and died with this church as the central structure in their lives were telling me so.  Whatever the reason, we were soon back outside in the December sun of a fine Arizona day feeling like a weight had been lifted from us. Before we left, we all had a wonderful lunch of Indian fry bread and beans from one of the kiosks around the parking lot of the mission where locals eke out a living selling food and native art to tourists.  That evening we all came down with stomach cramps and a bad case of the Hershey Squirts.  I did not complain about it too much as the food was good and it might have been part of the whole cleansing process, a colonic for the soul.

An interesting and inexpensive attraction in Tucson is the International Wildlife Museum. 
Even though they have over 400 species on display its only about a $10 for an adult and $5 for kids. The reason why it is so cheap is that the critters are all stuffed, dead, pining for the fjords demised.  I thought it was going to be creepy as I never understood why anyone other than a fucked-up Texan would put the heads of dead animals on the interior walls of their homes.  But somehow in this place it worked.  I had no idea how many species of antelopes there were. Did you know that the White Rhino is not really white?  White is a bad English translation of the Dutch word wijd, which means wide, referring the size of the beast’s mouth.  Makes one wonder why the English got to name the beast and why the Dutch got to name it before them.  My guess is that the original Zulu name was penis nose, so I am happy with White.

If Tucson is strange in December it is downright miserable in June, made barely tolerable by the act of sipping a Corona under the RV awning.  We were staying in a nice RV park with a swimming pool which we made use of every day we were there.  It felt great in the pool, but I am not sure that it was worth it as the sun hurt you on the two-minute walk to the pool and then punished you on the same walk back.

In May of that year LoriAnne had separated from her husband of eight years. Their marriage had turned almost from the start, but Judy and I took a while to notice.  He was a giant of a man who had nearly gown up in our house as he was best friends with Marty.  When Marty joined the Navy, he still hung out at our house and began dating LoriAnne while she was still in HS.  The warning signs were there, we just never saw them or were blind to them.  Delda saw them.  Gail who eventually married Wes saw them.  They both tried to warn us, but we didn’t hear or did not want to hear.  We knew that he had grown up in a dysfunctional family but that was them, not him.  But it was hard not to see his true colors after they had been married for a few years.  LoriAnne had supported him through college, moving from Corvallis, to Klamath Falls where he finally got a degree in engineering.  He couldn’t seem to get a job right away, so they moved back to Waldport for a bit.  He had a part-time coaching job with the high school, and she commuted back and forth to Corvallis over one of the worst roads in the state as she needed to earn enough to support them.  He finally landed a good job in Tucson and they moved there, where the shit he was dishing out to her became so obvious that no one, not even Judy and I could miss it. 

When we were there for Christmas Judy and I could sense the tension and saw firsthand some of what he was putting her though.  It was years later that I learned more of the details.  LoriAnne was wise to hide them from me as even though it has now been several years, the anger wells up within me whenever I think of him.  

There is true evil in this world, and he was and still is part of it, made all the worse by his professed Christianity.  I expect a lot from someone who proclaims their Christianity.   Professing your belief in a loving God and accepting Jesus as your personal savior is a commitment which means something.  It is an important and solemn commitment to do good in the world, to love and care for your family, to stand up for what is right and tell the truth no matter what the consequences. 

It is not easy to do this.  Sin is easy and I fail in this regard more than I care to mention. But what kind of Christian hits his wife in the stomach so the bruises don’t show?  What kind of Christian cheats on her with a best friend and again with the marriage counselor they were going to?  What kind of Christian keeps his wife’s doll collection, which was given to her by her mother, one every Christmas since she was eight?  He’s no Christian.  He’s a monster.  For several years I fantasized about sneaking out of Waldport, taking the red eye to Tucson, then sneaking up behind him with a baseball bat and breaking his spine, then slipping back to Waldport before Judy wakes up and finds me missing.  Now there’s a big-time sin and sort of impractical.  I have also seen myself putting my arm gently around his shoulders to give him this sage advice,

“Do yourself a favor son, kill yourself before you pollute the next generation like your father did yours”. 

But it’s too late for that now; he’s spawned with his second ex-wife.  Yes, I want revenge.  I want to rub his nose in his vileness, make him suffer, as he not only abused and betrayed my daughter, but he also abused and betrayed Judy and I as we once viewed him as a son.  But then what kind of Christian would I be?     

In May of the year, when LoriAnne had finally had enough of his abuse, she moved in with Delda who was renting a house in Tucson.  The house was owned by one of Delda’s coworkers in the Badlands National Park.  When Delda was laid off during the winter she had moved to Tucson and took a job as a waitress rather than bartend at the rough and dangerous cowboy bar in Interior, South Dakota.  The house was large with a back yard complete with a covered patio.  After Delda left for her job in the Badlands, LoriAnne had the house to herself, where her workday morning ritual was to take her cup of coffee out to the patio and have a smoke before the day got too hot to be outside.  One morning as she was about to do her usual, she noticed she had an unwelcome visitor in the form of a four-foot rattlesnake just outside the sliding glass door.  In Tucson, snakes are protected.  If you have a problem with a snake, the city will come and get it and move it for you.  But LoriAnne needed her coffee and smoke right then and there so she decided to handle the situation on her own.  On her way out the front door she grabbed a broom, and an empty plastic garbage can and slipped into the back yard by the side gate.  She then laid the can on its side and managed to direct the snake into the can using the broom.  Quickly up righting the can she carried the now incarcerated reptile to the fence dumping it into her neighbor’s yard for them to deal with while saving the taxpayers of Tucson a few dollars in their snake relocation budget.  The snake did not seem to be bothered by this procedure.  It was used to it. 

Like I said, Tucson is a strange city.  I don’t particularly care for it and never intend to go back.