Where to begin.
It has been an amazing and amazingly busy time for Nancy and me. I suppose it began in early September with DragonCon, which was great fun, as it always is. I don’t know how many more DragonCons I’ll be attending, but if this is the last, it was a good one with which to end. I saw many friends, received lots of support and love from people who hadn’t seen me since last fall. And my panels were uniformly interesting, well-attended, and entertaining.
I got home September 2 and Nancy and I spent the next ten days readying our house for real estate showings. We moved furniture, cleaned like dervishes, and made the house look like something out of Good Housekeeping. It worked, but more on that shortly.
A week and a half after DragonCon, we went out to Washington State for a wonderful wedding celebration of the daughter of dear friends and her partner. We were out there for a week, sharing a house overlooking the Hood Canal with a terrific group, a mix of old (college) friends and new ones — the newly formed Forbidden Freak Show!! (Long story . . . .)
While we were away, our real estate agent began to show our house to interested buyers. We received an offer the first day — for our asking price! — and had a preliminary contract signed after two days.
And then things really began to get crazy: We flew home from Washington on September 19th, were home for two full days — time enough to do laundry, take care of a few things at home, sign some documents for the real estate agents, and sleep a little.
On September 22nd, we boarded a plane in Atlanta and began the fifteen hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa. For the next three weeks, we experienced what may be the most remarkable travel experience either of us will ever have. We spent the first several days in the Pretoria and Johannesburg area, the highlight being a full-day (close to nine hours) tour of JoBerg, which included visits to the Apartheid Museum, the township of Soweto, Nelson Mandela’s home in Soweto, the Hector Pieterson Memorial near where the Soweto Uprisings of 1976 began, the Constitution Hill prison where Mahatma Gandhi and Mandela were once held, and the Constitutional Court which is now located there.
It was a long, difficult day. Our African tour guides were fabulous — knowledgeable, passionate, patient with our questions, brutally honest with their answers. We learned a ton, and came away with a far deeper understanding of the anguish caused by Apartheid, and the continuing legacy of that cruel chapter in South African history.
Our host in Pretoria was a good friend, a Black American who lives there now and is, himself, steeped in South African lore, culture, and history. Our conversations with him that night were illuminating as well.
After Johannesburg, we flew to the Kruger National Park region for six days of photo safari. We stayed in two different game reserves, Manyeleti and Timbavati, which are part of the Greater Kruger area and share open boundaries with the national park, providing additional wilderness. The animals there are completely wild and the game reserves actually tend to have tighter restrictions on what visitors can do and where safari trucks can go. I intend to write in great detail about the safari part of our trip in an upcoming post. For now, it is enough to share a photo and tell you that the six days of morning and evening bush drives, twelve drives in all, were some of the most memorable days of my life. I was blown away again and again and again by the animals and birds we saw, and by the expertise of our driver and tracker, who worked so hard to show us SO MUCH cool stuff. Simply incredible.
From the Kruger area, we flew to Cape Town, for another week of sightseeing, wine-tasting, whale watching (yes, we saw Southern Right Whales!!), penguin watching, and general fun. We went down to the Cape of Good Hope, which was spectacular, and ate several terrific meals over the course of this last week away.
We flew home on the 11th/12th of October and drove home from Atlanta.
But wait, there’s more! On October 14th, still jet-lagged, we flew up to New York for what we thought would be the closing for our new home in upstate New York. As it turns out, it wasn’t — scheduling issues. Still we had a nice visit with my brother, sister-in-law, and niece. We flew back home on October 16th. Did more laundry, slept a bit more. And then flew on October 19th to Denver, where we had time with Erin and marked the one-year anniversary of the death of our older daughter, Alex. It was a good visit, hard for all of us, but also easier than it would have been had we remained apart.
Finally, we flew home on the 23rd of October, and then had the closing on the New York house the next day, remotely from the office of a notary and generous friend we have here in our little town.
We now have a bit less than four weeks to pack up the house, close on the sale of the house, and move on up to our new home. Piece of cake, right?
Actually, I expect that while it won’t be easy-peasy, neither will it be too overwhelming. We are living very much in the moment right now, both with the wonderful things we’re experiencing, and also with the stuff that just needs doing. Obviously, packing and cleaning the house falls under the latter category. But the promise of our new place is pretty wonderful, and that keeps us going. I plan to write more about the move sometime soon as well. But first, later this week, our unbelievable experiences in the African wilderness.
Until then, take care, be good to one another, and have a great week!
This [see the photo above] will soon be our new home. It is in New York’s Hudson Valley, near Albany, on six-plus acres of beautiful land, complete with gardens, fruit trees, and a small pond. More important, it is maybe twenty minutes from my brother and sister-in-law, is equally close to one of my dearest friends and his partner, and is within easy drives of many other friends and family.
More to the point, though, back in the day, I used to perform regularly. Along with my dear, dear friends Alan Goldberg and Amy Halliday, I was in a band called Free Samples. Three voices, two guitars. Acoustic rock — CSN, Beatles, Paul Simon/Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Pousette-Dart, etc. We performed several times a semester, usually at the campus coffee house, but also at special events during which we shared the evening with other acoustic bands.
As I made clear earlier, I am not the player or singer I used to be, mostly because I don’t work at it as I once did. And so I’m afraid I’ll sound bad. Alan and Dan have played together a lot over the past several years, including live performances and online concerts they gave during the pandemic. They sound great as a twosome and I don’t want to ruin that. They have terrific on-stage rapport, just as Alan and I did back when we were young. I don’t want to get in the way of that, either. And I have overwhelmingly positive memories of my performing days. I don’t want to sully those recollections with a performance now that is subpar. I don’t want to embarrass myself.
Our girls LOVED Sewanee Fourth of July when they were young. We would give them a bit of cash, help them meet up with friends, and then pretty much say goodbye to them for the day. It’s a small, safe, friendly town, and we never worried about them. They always found us eventually, sunburned and sweaty, their faces covered in face-paint, their pockets stuffed with candy that was thrown to kids by the parade participants. We’d go home, have a nap and some dinner, not that any of us was very hungry, and then, after covering ourselves with bug spray, would make our way to the fireworks venue.
Somewhere along the way, as her battle went on, Alex decided she wanted to have the image of those blooms tattooed on her arm. She turned to a friend from NYU who had become an accomplished tattoo artist. This friend, Ally Zhou, specializes in fine line work, and was the ideal person to render the precise details of the dried bouquet. The result was a gorgeous tattoo that Alex bore proudly for the rest of her too-short life.
I know there are many of you reading this for whom a small tattoo is no big deal. You have sleeves or extensive back pieces or whatever. I think that’s great. But as I say, this was something Nancy and I had never intended to do. It felt momentous, like a ritual of sorts, a way of alchemizing our grief into something physical and shared and public, something that links us to one another and to Alex. I love my new tattoo, for what it means as well as for how it looks.