Travels with Matty 2018

I went to the Guggenheim Tuesday. What a good way to view an exhibition. You go round and round, up and up achieving a pleasing continuity, after which you can review what you’ve seen on the way down. A great idea from Frank Lloyd Wright that never caught on. The other idea he had that never caught fire was his design of a movie theater with its rows of seats that were angled instead of facing flush to the screen. His thinking was that the viewer rarely sits upright facing straight ahead, but is more comfortable in a relaxed, cross-legged position facing off to the side of the screen. Brilliant.  I went to see the Giacometti exhibition prepared for a raft of pinchy figures like you always see, but was pleasantly surprised to see a variety of styles and an explanation of his art. He says he could work a piece of clay for a thousand years and it might show a bit of progress. This explains why some of his wood works are teeny tiny. I liked his dog, but was most taken by his sculpture ...

Some day there will exist a continuous bicycle path around the island of Manhattan along the Harlem, East, and Hudson Rivers and through Battery Park. It will be for cyclists what the Highline has become for pedestrians. As it exists today, however, there are a score of gaps in the route forcing riders into neighborhoods using roads that are not bike-friendly before allowing re-access to the waterside as well as adding miles to the itinerary. It is not for the faint of heart. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the enthusiasm and intrepidness of my riding partner I could not today say that I have circumnavigated Manhattan by bicycle. I will be in New York through the weekend with only a few items on the schedule. Tonight I’ll visit with family. Tomorrow night I’ll attend a play at a theater with some number of offs in its description. The weekend will find me at Forest Hills, home of the US Open, where my host will be playing in a tennis tournament in both singles and doubles. He says he w...

     Sunday was a free day in Lafayette so I drove around the countryside revisiting some of the sights Kathy and I saw ten years ago and seeing some new ones. In Loreauville I stopped at the little cemetery to view Clifton Chenier’s grave. Instead of listing the dates of his and his wife’s birth and death his gravestone had engraved in it their alpha and omega. I failed to look at other gravestones to determine if the alpha/omega designation is common in the cemetery or if it is unique to the Cheniers. I guess I’ll have to make another pilgrimage.      The Evangeline Oak in St. Martinsville marks the omega of the Evangeline legend. I visited the alpha of the story last year when I drove through Acadia country in Nova Scotia. The story, as immortalized by the Wordsworth poem, is about two Acadians, Evangeline and Gabriel, who fell in love, but were separated when the English drove the them from their land in Canada. They were not reunited until years later...

     Kathy and I liked to make up terms to describe various phenomena we encountered. When you are passing cars on the interstate and a car cuts in front of you, you have been mattied. If you are cut off by a truck that is barely going faster than the vehicle in front and you have to wait forever behind it then you have been kathied. I was not mattied yesterday, but I was kathied three times. You now have names for these inconveniences. You’re welcome.      The drive from Santa Fe to Abilene, Texas is boring. The highlight was Clovis, Mew Mexico near the Texas border. It seems to be the freight train capital of the world. Trains are constantly going by. At the train crossing I had to wait for three separate trains to pass. My mom would have loved it. Whenever she saw a freight train she thought of all the trucks that were not on the road because of it.      Abilene is a cute town. It has amusing sculptures all over town, it has a Waldo-like...

I was greeted in Santa Fe by an unprecedented heat wave. The national park and most good hiking areas are closed due to fire danger. There is a fire raging near Durango as evidence of what can happen. Tuesday morning we got right to it with a hike somewhere. My hosts dutifully explain where we are going each day and kindly ask things like, "Do you want to hike 10 miles at 14 miles today?" I remain neutral in all decisions and just let them dictate my life for a couple of days. The Tuesday hike is a hot one. I would jokingly compare it to the Bataan Death March, but at what point is that appropriate or acceptable. I don’t imagine it would have been joked about 70 years ago. But now it’s okay. We can tell jokes about the Spanish Inquisition, about the Salem Witch Trials, even Joan of Arc at the stake. How long until we hear 9/11 jokes? Holocaust jokes? I am slowly becoming a hiking afficionado. They used to all be similar walks in nature. Now, I rate them. Tuesday’s good hike w...

We hit the road at 5:07 am and turned on the radio to the news of the apparent suicide of Anthony Bourdain. The news hit me hard. I remember some years ago after "Kitchen Confidential" and before the tv showsthat  Bourdain published a mystery book and was in Portland flogging it at a mystery book store owned by a friend of Kathy’s and mine. He was totally gracious and entertaining, a rare combination. Kathy loved the book and was enamoured of the guy. There is a photo somewhere of a smiling Bourdain side by side with a beaming Kathy. He was late for the event because, I think, he got lost on the way. Rather than throw his assistant under the bus he took full responsibility himself. A small detail that made a large impression. When I began last year’s road trip I was thinking a lot about life, death and happiness. I didn’t think that this year’s road trip would begin the same way. If you were to design templates for the ideal life, Bourdain’s might well have been one of them. ...

Leaving Portland this morning my goal is to arrive in Salt Lake by dinner. I thought the time change gave me an extra hour so I could dawdle before departure. I mentioned this to a friend and she said: "Oh, are you driving west?" I don’t think she was being a wiseacre, but I’m not sure. In any case, it will be an early start.  I can think of three ways this trip will differ from last year’s. One is weather. Last years‘ fall, northern route made for pleasant, sometimes cool temperatures the whole time which led to a fair amount of camping. This year Precious and I will be in the south and are looking at temperatures in the 80’s and 90’s. Possibly the 100’s. Precious is hoping to spending less time in tents and more time in air-conditioned motels. I expect her to get her wish.  Another difference: Emma Peel, our trusty steed, powered by the cheating diesel engine designed and sold by the criminals at VW has been modified. The modification was much more extensive than I had real...