Oh! The People You’ll Meet! (Apologies to Dr. Seuss)
Under the category of Stranger in a Strange Land, things change. My generation revolted (and were sometimes revolting) and rioted and demonstrated against the VietNam War and for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. We marched. We made documentaries. Oh, we were so idealistic.
AdventureMan, my husband, was a warrior from the beginning, and fought in that unpopular war. When he returned home, people were harassing returning soldiers, even spitting on them.
Emotions have calmed through the years, and many surviving fighters in that war, men and women, have had a tough time dealing with their participation in the war. We often see homeless veterans here in Pensacola; the homeless find Pensacola comfortable, and temperate. You can sleep rough most of the year.
My husband keeps his eye open for fellow vets. When he sees someone with a VietNam vet bumper sticker, or wearing a VietNam Vet bill cap, he’ll go over, shake hands, and swap old war stories. It can be a very moving moment for both parties involved. War-fighting is intense. There are things you don’t forget. There are things you do forget, and years later, they come back in dreams, not good dreams.
And there are also fraudsters out there. Some are well-meaning, well enough, or just oblivious. Some are trying to fake an experience they didn’t have.
We had a homeless man here in Pensacola we helped occasionally. When he told us he had also been in the military, AdventureMan started talking with him and soon started looking very confused. “He’s never been anywhere near being in the military,” he told me, “No one in the military forgets where they did their basic training or can’t remember where they were stationed.” Nothing makes a person mad like someone straight out lying.
Other times, it isn’t so manipulative, it is just ignorant. In the local Apple Market, AdventureMan shook a man’s hand and asked where he’d been in VietNam and the man just looked foolish and said, “It isn’t really my hat, a friend gave it to me.”
More recently, out at Peg Leg Pete’s on the beach, as we were leaving, AdventureMan stopped to talk with a man wearing a 7th Cav hat. But no, he had never been in the 7th Cav; he had been in the Navy, and he was a Cowboy Re-Enactor. He also looked sheepish.
People are tribal. The like association. Kids wear Nikes because they want to play basketball like Michael Jordan. Some people wear Florida State hats because they hope Florida State wins the big game, not because they have ever set foot on the Florida State campus. Or Hawaiaan shirts, or turquoise squash blossom jewelry, or Yosemite sweatshirts (me), because of the association. It’s just the way we are, expressing ourselves with tribes, aspirational or not.
It’s a bad idea to give an impression, knowingly, which may be easily discovered to be false. I had a friend once who found an old sorority pin in a thrift store and wore it as costume jewelry. I told her it was a bad idea, that sororities inspire deep loyalties, and wearing a pin to a sorority that you don’t belong to could damage your reputation. I think she chose to wear it ironically.
Living in Doha, where designer copies were cheap and plentiful, one of my Japanese friends told me that she would NEVER buy a copy; that people who know what details to look for would know you were a pretender. Once you got that reputation, you would always be known as a person who couldn’t afford the real thing. I listened and learned!
AdventureMan says, “Be careful what you wear because of the message that it sends. If you didn’t earn it, don’t wear it.” His Dad was a SeaBee, but he would never wear his Dad’s insignia. People may not be trying to fool people, but people will see what you are wearing and make assumptions.
The majority of people wearing military memorabilia actually have a legitimate connection to that unit, and greeting them results in truly wonderful moments of sharing and camaraderie.
Also – if you believe no women were serving in VietNam, you need to read Kristin Hannah’s book, The Women. Women served as nurses, medics and doctors, as Red Cross workers, and in administrative roles. Although not in combat, they served their country and were shot at, wounded, killed, hit by explosives, died in helicopter evacuations. They suffered PTSD and were treated as poorly as the other wounded vets that came out of that war.
Waiting for Snow
Lest you think I sit around between trips finding things to rant about, I will share my Saturday with you.
I am religious. I am a believer. LOL, here is where Catholics and Muslims have something in common – when I say “I am a believer” my Catholic friends think I am Catholic, and my Muslim friends think I am Muslim. Sooner or later we get it all figured out. I believe in a Great Creator, without whom nothing was created, and who is magnificent beyone our ability to understand. I believe he cares about us on an individual basis, and that he wants only good for all of us, whether we agree or not. I do not understand why he gave us all free will, and I know it would be a terrible world without it. I believe God is infinitely merciful.
So in the midst of some of the political horrors of January, I texted a friend and said “I need a meet-up.” We met up this morning at a local cafe and hashed out our lives, just normal stuff, families, husbands, children, and what we CAN do to make a difference. I have a friend from high school, and a friend from college, and friends from almost every post where we lived. We don’t always see one another, but when we need a good connection, we get on the phone – yeh, old school – and it’s like we’ve never been apart. When I need to re-balance, when my emotions are unmanageable, my friends help me recenter. Thanks be to God. At the cafe, I also saw another old friend, of a different political persuasion, and we were delighted to see one another, reminding me that our current differences are temporary, and mendable.
I arrived back home to the aroma of garlic and peppers sautéing; AdventureMan is making beans! We have been informed it MIGHT snow tonight, it is hovering just above and below freezing and a big pot of beans is a perfect hot weather meal.
Birds on the Bayou are chowing down, the fish must be running. We have pelicans plunging, an eagle chasing off a hawk, a cormorant and a heron.
Last year, almost this same time of year, we got several inches of snow. In previous years, I have seen a flake of snow here and there, but last year was a special confluence of factors – humidity, cold, polar vortex and a series of cold dry days in which the snow first fell, and then stuck around. It was like wiping away all the bad, a clean, clear new earth, few cars driving, lots of walking and lots of playing. Maybe we all need to play a little more. Pensacolians love a good snow, and it doesn’t stick around long enough to get old.
Our house is warm, we have a big pot of beans cooking, we have friends, I’ve recovered all my lost-for-a-very-short-time passwords and life is sweet. May you be equally blessed; may all your problems be little ones.
Oh Those Poor White People, Those Poor White Men
First, a disclaimer. I like men. I like men a lot. Some of my best friends are men, of all colors and nationalities. I am married to a white man.
Our Glorious Leader, the Bone-Spur Coward-in-Chief declares (as he has in Executive Orders from Day One of his Regency) that diversity, equality and inclusiveness are discrimitory against white males, and are hurting them.
I challenge Trump to take a look at statistics. I challenge him to tally the ranks of CEOs and Executives in the USA to see just what percentage of each sex and race are in those positions, and in what proportions. IF white males are not dominant, I will eat this post.
Yes. This is a rant. Yes, I am livid. As a woman, I was privileged to go to university, privileged because my own father was sure that women’s place was in the home, having children, taking care of you know, women things. He was shocked and horrified that I didn’t get a teacher’s degree or a nursing degree, or why had he sent me to college?
A very small percentage of women and people of color have managed to get to the highest positions of influence, power and wealth in the United States. So tell me about the poor white men!
For my American friends who scorn the Middle East; I lived in three countries, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the voters – men – recently voted for the women in their countries to have the vote. These were men who love their mothers, sisters, cousins, wives and daughters and wanted them to have the dignity of choice of leadership in their own countries. They educated their daughters, and even, in Saudia Arabia, would take their daughters out to the deserts and teach them how to drive, even though it was illegal in Saudi Arabia for women to drive. These Arab, Islamic men you denigrate supported the right of females to vote, to have access to good education. At one time they sent them to the United States. I don’t imagine they will be sending their daughters -or their sons – here now.
It is unthinkable to me that these statements are issuing from privileged white men in charge of our country. We’re looking at universities in Ireland and Scotland where universities will, as US universities once did, encourage free exchange of ideas and fraternity, and equality and respect and dignity of all people.
At one time, not too long ago, in our country, we had laws, and those laws were obeyed! We had laws protecting the cleanliness of our air and water, we had laws protecting the rights of citizens – and non-citizens. We had laws against profiting from public office, laws requiring the disclosure of personal interests, and recusal from decisions that might enrich the decision-maker. We had laws requiring oversight of government policies. We had a Supreme Court that acted with impartiality. We had a President who was not above the law. We had alliances with countries with whom we stood shoulder to shoulder for decades against bullies and thugs.
I expect my son will call and warn me that our Orange Acting President of Venezuela is about to take away my citizenship and send his Goons to my door with zip ties for speaking out. Or maybe just come and shoot me in the face as I offer cookies and ice tea?
From Axios: America’s Healthiest and Least Healthy States
(The United Health Foundation was established by UnitedHealth Group in 1999 as a nonprofit, private foundation dedicated to improving health and health care. To date, the United Health Foundation has committed more than $845 million to programs and communities around the world, including a $100 million commitment to help advance and grow the health care workforce.” (from the United Health Foundation website)
This is one of the non-governmental agencies using facts and statistics to measure outcomes of health practices in the USA. Official statistics are disappearing. Entire years of government studies have been deleted from websites. Fortunately, there are people who saw it coming and who recorded the data from the websites, hoping for a future that respects science, research and statistics, and uses that research to create a greater good for us all, and shares that knowledge and best practices with the world.
So Much For Health and Transparency
It started during COVID. Politicians and their Administrations stopped publicizing statistics when the stats revealed their government was doing little or nothing to prevent spread of disease. Now, under the cover of cost reductions and eliminating fraud they are gutting the agencies that maintain the statistics and restricting publications of what few statistics are being gathered. Fortunately, private institutions and individuals are watching, keeping track, and doing their best to keep a vulnerable population informed.
Pensacola New Year’s Sunset over the Bayou
We moved to this house at the beginning of COVID. You wouldn’t think it was a great time to go house hunting or to move, but it worked for us. Almost every day, I thank my husband for moving here (he had said “No more moves!” but COVID made things different.) Almost every day is a sunset – not unlike this one, but no two are identical. Every day. It never fails to thrill my heart. Happy New Year!
British Isles: Farewell to Bergen, Jupiter and Good Friends
The alarm goes off too early, the bags outside our door are gone and we quickly dress and head to the lounge for departure. It is raining! This is the only real rain we saw the entire trip, and our guide says “Welcome to the REAL Bergen!” We had the special-day sunny Bergen for our previous day, and were doubly thankful for it.
Our route back takes us to Copenhagen, then Atlanta, then Pensacola, and all flights departed and arrived as scheduled. The flight out of Bergen, however, was hilarious. There were 32 rows on the flight. The first 18 rows were Business Class. The last 14 rows were economy. They were labeled. They looked exactly the same. Business class boarded and debarked through the front. Economy boarded and debarked through the rear of the plane. I’ve never seen this before!
I would have liked more time in Copenhagen, but it was a rush through the facial recognition machines, a rush to customs and baggage searches, and a walk to our gate, where we were soon boarded.
The SAS flight into Atlanta was delightful. Good movies, a little off the beaten track, and good meals. We had cheerful, polite service with a genuine feeling of goodwill.
It’s good to be home, to have our family and sweet kitties all together. And our brains are scrambled. There are so many cities, my brain can’t always keep it straight. I keep confusing the Orkney Island experiences with the Shetland experiences, and confuse the capitals as well. I am thankful I kept the journal, but even the journal is confused from time to time. And the missing photos jarred my thinking, and my confidence.
Thank you to my life long partner, AdventureMan, in adventure and marriage, for sharing these great times, for reading and correcting my mistakes and for contributing so many great photos of Scara Brae to fill in where I had deleted my photos. And thank you, readers, for going along on this great long cruise with us and being patient with my endless photos.
British Isles: Sunny Bergen and a Delightful End
Bergen was a treat. We docked earlier than expected, and I wasn’t even awake. We ate a leisurely breakfast, a light breakfast because we were meeting up with friends at an old Bergen restaurant where we had reservations for lunch.
The trip is ending, and we are not ready. We decide to forego packing and head into Bergen (we are docked in the city) to explore a little before lunch. It is a bright sunny day, and a warm day in Bergen. It is still early, so not yet crowded as we walk into the downtown area to explore the fish market and surrounds, and take some documentary photos.
Strange experience with Starbucks restroom. Had coffee, saw signs for restrooms – through the next door empty bar, and up two flights of stairs. A man coming out held the door for me, and I found the restroom flooded and needing repair. Back downstairs, AdventureMan asked how I had gotten in when I didn’t have “the code” and I said I hadn’t needed one, and then remembered the man who had held the door open a I headed up. I had not realized there was a code, and I hadn’t needed it. Others were flummoxed at having climbed all those stairs only to realize they needed to ask for the code before heading up.
Our friends caught up with us at Starbucks and we headed over to the restaurant. There was a long line! All Chinese! They were shown upstairs. We said we had reservations and they showed us upstairs, too, where we were seated next to the large group.
We think this might be the best trip ever because of all the conversations with our good friends:
We ordered drinks and appetizers, and the group next to us was served soup, and lavish shrimp open-faced sandwiches, and then dessert, and we never saw our original waitress again. Finally we had waited politely long enough, AdventureMan stopped another waitress and asked where the rest of our meals were – it had been about 40 minutes. Evidently there had been a communication problem among the staff, but once it was brought to their attention that were waiting for the rest of our order, it showed up almost immediately.
AdventureMan had the fish soup and a huge platter of crab claws, and I had the venison in wine sauce. There was so much I needed the others to help me out. They didn’t mind – it was really delicious.
We walked slowly back to the ship. It was time to pack and we didn’t want to pack. Our suitcases had to be organized, packed, and outside in the hall for pick-up to get us to the airport early the next morning. They warn us to clean out our safes, keep aside medications, and pack travel clothes separately in our carryon bags. We laughed, but we also imagined that these are things that have caused problems in the past. Packing wasn’t that hard, and we head for one last visit to the spa.
Meeting up with our friends for dinner, we work some on the problems of the world, and then on our more immediate problems – family, travel plans, things we have to deal with in the real world. It’s still light outside after our long (also light) dinner, so AdventureMan and I take a last walk into downtown Bergen and back to settle ourselves. We actually sleep well.
Sun setting over Bergen:
British Isles: Lerwick, Shetland and Jarlshof
We are finally here! Were were excited about visiting the Shetland Islands back when we did The Wake of the Vikings, but the weather made the water too tough to dock or tender in, and we had to skip the Shetland Islands. It was particularly disappointing to AdventureMan, as he had watched every episode of Shetland, a mystery series on Netflix.
As it turns out, he wasn’t alone – one of the first things the guide mentions is that everyone wants to see where the murders were committed (and through the trip, she showed us!) but that the show made The Shetlands look like the murder capitol of the world, when in truth, daily life tends to be very routine, and crime of any kind is limited. And everybody knows everybody.
Probably half of our bus had watched the show, or read Ann Cleeves addictive books about Shetland, and there was a lot of enthusiasm and appreciation from the people on the bus when the guide pointed out the places where the crimes really did not take place.
On our way this morning, this cracked me up. The local ferry, the North Link, with a big Viking on it passes the huge Viking ship as if we were barely moving, LOL. I guess it just struck me as funny. Maybe he’s pointing the way, thinking we are lost.
Today, it is cloudy, but they are high clouds, and foggy, the kind that burns off by late morning, and AdventureMan spots a seal sporting in the Viking Jupiter wake as we are docking.
I was wearing a skirt, but I change into Levi’s because it is chill, this is Juneau, Alaska, where I grew up kind of August. I wear a shirt under a sweater, and carry a windbreaker, which I later don when we hit Jarlshof, our destination today.
En route, we pass gorgeous bays, fields full of fat, happy sheep, contented cows and frisky Shetland ponies. We stop for a break in Hoswick where I find a gorgeous handmade coffee cup, and love the old crafts demonstrations set up there. It was still very early – barely 8:30, so they had gone to some trouble to be open when we passed through.
In this village I see something that blows my mind, an entire hedge which is a fuchsia shrub. Fuchsias are special to me; I used to buy one for my Mother for Mother’s Day. I have tried to keep hanging fuchsia’s almost everywhere we have lived, but they are very particular – don’t like heat at all, and need just the right amount of water. The guide tells me this is a hardy fuchsia, and they are grown all over the Shetlands because they love it there. What luxury!
We see a tall ship out in the adjoining bay. Our guide is smart, and a good story-teller. She tells us not much really grown in the Shetlands to support life; the trees are mostly gone, some grow potatoes and vegetables in family plots, but the main industry, until the oil fields came, has been fishing, particularly herring. There are herring stations near where our boat is docked, and she tells us there were women called the “gutting girls” who would flay and salt the herring and put them in barrels to ship around the world.
We learned the Shetlands have only been a part of Scotland for the last 500 years; before that they were largely settled by Danes and Norwegians. The streets are named after Norwegian kings, and their language is a marvelous combination of Norwegian language patterns coupled with Scottish vocabulary.
We reach Jarlshof, literally the house of the Earl, and there is a ruin of a medium sized stone house with more-or-less modern dimensions. The treat, though, is that (like Scara Brae in the Orkneys) a large storm uncovered ruins of dwellings dating back more than 4,000 years, built partly underground but covered by sand over the years.
The people who lived here were smart, and inventive. They created archways and strong tunneled wheel-houses, for living, for storage, or so the anthropologists and archaeologists surmise. The truth is, no one knows how or why, or even who made these dwellings. No one really knows whether they died out, or were driven away when the Northmen invaded, or if they assimilated – most of the Orkneys and Shetland Islands have a large portion of Nordic blood running in their veins.
Seeing these early dwellings is a thrill, and it is further thrilling knowing that there may be even earlier dwellings underneath these ones. No one wants to destroy what they have found so far to search for earlier peoples.
Equally thrilling is that while we are touring Jarlshof, the sun breaks through and the landscape looks different, no longer shades of grey and diffuse with fog, now it is bright and shines with energetic colors.
You never know when suddenly you will find a treasure, and today, as I was exiting through the Visitor Center, I saw some truly gorgeous scarves, in classic colors with classic patterns, created by a Scottish Heritage foundation. I couldn’t resist. Sometimes you see something special and you know it. This scarf thrills my heart.
Leaving Jarlhof, we are stopped by a gate across the road and a red light. The road crosses the airport landing strip, and a plane is landing, stopping all traffic in both directions until the gates are lifted once again. We watch the plane land, and then we proceed. I’ve since learned from Ann Cleeves that this is Sumburgh Airport, into which investigators and medical examiners fly from Aberdeen when there are all these murders in Shetland.
Our ride home is beautiful, again the hills with sheep and cows and ponies, even a few goats. We see small farms, we reach Lerwick where the Viking Jupiter is docked and see granite and sandstone buildings, a high street for shopping and modern supermarkets. Our guide is very proud to tell us that most of the shops in the Shetlands are privately owned, with very few chain stores. Shopping is more personal. Mail order through the internet is iffy – because everything has to come in by air or by sea, weather plays a big role, particularly the wind and rain, and no one guarantees “next-day” delivery.
Back on board, we both choose Malabar beef curry with roasted carrots and are delighted. Afterwards, we go down to the main lounge for coffee, then to the spa to exercise and to recover from our morning.
I try to carve a time each day when I can write this journal while our memories are still fresh, but there is so much! I wake up in the middle of the night remembering new things I need to tell you about!
We are starting to think about packing. Every time we think about it, we put it off. Our ship just departed Shetland for Bergen, Norway, where we will spend the day tomorrow, then depart on Monday for home. We can pack tomorrow.
Leaving Shetland – even the skies and seas are the Shetland colors of my scarf!
Maybe this was the best day of our trip?
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