Trounce Alley Grazing

In my youth I had an image of where I would be so many decades later, meaning at my age now. I saw myself sitting in a high backed easy chair, by a fire, across from the missus, reading a good book.

That vision came to me last night as I sat at my laptop in one room, reading Twitter on Brizzly. The missus was downstairs in her home office reading the New York Times while my son was at his desk, on his Apple reading heaven-knows-what.

This is not the image from the past because none of these things, laptops, NYT.com or Apple Computers, existed back then. Okay, way back then.

So, young people, as you sit and envision where you’ll be and what you will be doing in forty or fifty years, fahgetaboutit! It doesn’t exist yet.

Enjoy the now and the stuff that makes the now, time.
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We were using the FamousGrazing.com URL for one of our first blogs.  There was a problem with the host and the server.  Instead of pay what was clearly extortion, we let the registration lapse.

Lighthouse near Juneau

The URL was held hostage for a few years with no takers.  Recently it was released into the wild.  We snatched it up and registered it with DirectNIC.com.  We have been using them for years.  They are the most dependable URL registrar on the Internet

Which do you prefer? City life or country living? 

I would prefer City living and  country life.  Who wrote that question.  English as second language?  You live in the city, you stay in the country. Or. You visit the City and live in the country.  One cannot be exclusive of the other. It's no pre-wwII!!

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Some of the drifting famous grazing blogs were given hope by Ping.fm in January. I posted an entry then in the Xanga blog at http://ping.fm/4frro Still trying...

We have been trying to get xPollinate to send blog entries to Posterous and Vox. Our last try didn't work. Now we're trying to do the same from withing Ping.fm

I watched the second plane hit. I remember thinking "what kind of idiot would fly that close to take a look?" I still thought the first strike was an accident.

Growing up in Manhattan in the '50's I was used to stories of planes hitting the sky scrapers, the Empire State Building, the most infamous of them. I thought the second plane was coming around for a look when I saw it make the the turn over the harbor.

It took a moment to set in that this was done on purpose. It wasn't an act I thought possible.

I soon discovered I had lost friends sent to help and workers trapped on the upper floors.

My wife and I dined on a regular basis at Cellar in the Sky. We had even taken most of the staff out for drinks after closing.

What bothered me most this year is I didn't see it coming. When I first wrote the date on an official document, it hit me. It hit me so hard I had to sit.

I thought about 1949, the same amount of time after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Did people write 12/7/49 on official paper and suddenly remember Pearl Harbor? Or then, like now, had so much war and mayhem hit them, that one barbaric act lost some of its horror?
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(The piece below was written for a now dead blog. It was written nine years ago, before I did get to go to Alaska and the Yukon.**)

As with most Bloggers, this need to write often accompanies a lack of subject.---

We lead our ordinary lives in very ordinary ways and think most, if not all of it, to be so mundane as to be of no interest to the reading public. Then you visit places considered exotic to us and find it all to be totally amazing.

Stay a few weeks, hang out in cafes with the locals, become adopted by them as an honorary paison, sit and dis the tourists, eventually you find what was exotic when you arrived is now commonplace.

In Morocco, this happened to me in a short time. My high school French became the local patois, the small amount of Arabic I have picked up in my professional life assumed the local accent and jargon. I was soon sitting alone in the cafe, ordering food in a combined French and Arabic the locals speak.

Then we returned to the US via JFK. There the locals seemed exotic. Well, to speak to the truth, in NYC, most locals are. Our cab driver wore a deep red turban, the man who served us breakfast was from Athens, the bell boy from Azerbaijan, and the hotel clerk from Brazil. All tried and true New Yorkers.

Back in Boston, it took a while to start saying things like wicked and cah without feeling out of place. So, no matter where I have lived, or how soon it took me to adapt, eventually, it all became mundane and uninteresting, to a degree, for me. Ergo, being the center of the known universe and all, it must be the same for anyone reading anything I’ve ever written.

To make a list of places I have lived for more that six months at time: New Jersey, New York, South and then North Carolina, Southern California, Central Park, Northern California, Vermont and Massachusetts. The farthest east, of Boston that is, I have been is Morocco. The farthest west, from the same point, is Thailand. The furthest north I have ever been is Nova Scotia** and the furthest south is Barbados.

As I look at a globe, there is still a lot of real estate for me to cover to be considered a sophisticated world traveler. I want to go to Tierra del Fuego and Alaska, I want to visit St. Petersburg and Bombay. That should take care of most of the real estate I need to see and say, ’‘I’ve been.‘‘

Alaska is the only state of The Union I have not visited. I have been to Canada many times, but never further north, on the West Coast than the island of Victoria and the city of Vancouver. (Vancouver is much like NYC, exotic by its population alone. It is certainly not Toronto.)

So, Alaska is top on the list. I have seen the Lonely Planet, aka Trekkers, show on Alaska, even know the creatures I despise most on this planet live there in abundance. I still want to visit.

In the house in which I now live and own, reside 8 people. Three are family and five are extended guests. One is from pre-Castro Cuba by way of Mexico. Two others are adopted from Cambodia and Vietnam. The last not ‘from calls Brazil her home. The last of the five is exotic only in that he grew up in Queens, a hinterland of NYC to Manhattanites. 

I suppose there could be something interesting to write about them. The guest who just left called Kenya her home. There are stories there, but I would be speaking out of turn to tell them.

The late father of my oldest friend was from a part of northeastern Europe that over the past 200 years has been part of Poland, Germany, Austria, Russia and Poland and Germany, and Russia, etc. He joined a freighter in Riga, jumped overboard in Hackensack, swam to Ellis Island and got in line with legitimate immigrants, was given a new name and sent to Hoboken for a train ride out west. He got on the wrong train and ended up in Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station.

For some strange reason, being a stranger in a strange land, he thought Pennsylvania Station was in Pennsylvania. He was not aware of the American habit of naming places for where they are going rather than for where they are.

In Manhattan, he met a woman from Montreal. They married and had two sons. He became a book seller, trader, collector while his wife worked in the Garment Trade. When he died, leaving her with two school aged sons, she moved up in the union hierarchy. She was a saint and was considered so highly, not only by me, but her neighbors that, on her passing, the street upon which she lived for sixty some odd years was named in her honor.

Now that’s interesting. I get up in the morning, eat breakfast, drive to work, work, drive home, eat dinner, watch TV, read the news on line and go to bed, if needed, repeat. I go to church on Sunday and pay my taxes. I could go Walter Mitty and invent exotic corners to this life, but in truth it is about as ordinary as one can imagine.

Nothing I did up to around thirty-five could be considered ordinary. It took me three years of extensive physical therapy to recover from the first thirty five, or so, years. Since then, I have done all I can to be as ordinary as possible. It must be said, I am being quite successful in my ordinariness.

For those not born into it, there is extensive work involved.

My aging fingers are beginning to hurt. I think we’ll make this chapter one and be done with it.
Don’t hold your breath for chapter two. I will do my best to produce it, but you can just do so much with so little.
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LiveJournal Tags: Old Writing

Created a Blog at http://grazing.posterous.com/ just to see what it had to offer. Couldn't use the editor and gave up. After getting a prodding email from the developer, we went back to find they seems to have lined up the ducks in the proper order.

Now I have a Blog where I can upload YouTube embedded Blog entries via email. It as too simple.

We like simple.

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Looking back on 2008, what were the highlights of your year? 

Surviving the past eight years.

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Note, this online editor is not working in Opera 10.alpha

Have been trying to get the Blog-It feature linked to Friend Feed to post a Blog entry here at Belltower News with no success. I am sure it is because I have yet upgraded to the templates added after Google took over.

Tried another tweak. If this doesn't work, blogging will get another blow over the convenience of online social commenting.-30-