Dundee News

Our last few weeks have been about young people, ages 2 to 35. 

Over Labor Day weekend, we had the pleasure of three nights with Miles, Auden and Elliot. Brought back many memories of now older children, and Pop (Andrew's name) snuck a lot of kid food. MMMMMM! Plus, I now am an educated fan of Sponge Bob. All told, thank goodness for Lur, who took care of the hard stuff.

We had the kids because Bill and Jen went to Pennsylvania to attend to their new member of their family, an RV bus. We hope it provides them with many memories, but for now a work in progress. 

Daniel is now a working man, spending two days a week (an apprenticeship) at a high end men's salon in downtown Chicago. One of the salon's recent customers was a prominent Chicago newscaster. He is excited about his new job, and is expecting to do Barber school soon. Unfortunately, his roommates, who are college gymnasts, learned their program was being cut. Hopefully, the school will reconsider. 

Last weekend, we went up to Michigan to take some stuff up to Claire and check things out. She, and roommate friend, are renting an old house in Pentwater, next to Lake Michigan. Beautiful little resort town and a outstanding beach. Claire will commute to another little town to teach music in a little school. We visited the school, and saw the music room. Claire is it. Grade school to high school, she is Miss Dickson, the music program. We are pulling for her. 

We also had the experience of buying a car. Considering the location, Subaru won hands down. Don't tell Claire, but we plan on visiting a lot, but maybe not in winter. We stayed in a little motel a block from the water in Ludington. Nice little city with a ferry destination. 

Unfortunately, Bill and Jen experienced recently what everybody else has gone through. A flooded basement. It stinks, but they will get through it. We have had water in our basement recently, and diapers do a great job. Another great Lur idea. It is tough though lugging a bag of water-soaked diapers. Very heavy.

Some recent highlights: Another legendary Packer comeback, Willie's unfortunate conversation with a skunk, ribs on the grill, going through old files, getting the kids to let go of a lot of stuff to Goodwill, and starting to wear sweaters. Now the annual search for car snow scrapers.

I decided to not go through a letter without our new word which I have not heard before: lodestar. I guess I don't get out often.

 

September already, Ireland

Where did the summer go?  It's still here, as far as the heat and the thunderstorms and green leaves and grass cutting go. I'd consider ourselves lucky since normally the temps have already moved lower.  The days are certainly shorter, and a few of trees are starting to turn.  

All this by way of saying we here seem to have finally caught our breaths after a long stretch of summer activity going back to the Poconos.  We dropped off at the airport a Peace Corps friend on Monday and then have settled back into our routines, just the two of us.

We had a magical trip to Ireland.  There's no other way of describing it, and I think I'm not the first.  I can sum it up in three words: family, churches and pubs.  The magic part had to do with the Boyle family we encountered.  Our purpose for going was to attend a reunion of Boyles who came from Strabane on the border in Northern Ireland.  We found out that their town was kind of a ground zero for The Troubles, which confirms why Mary's father was even born here.  His parents came to escape capture.  Anyway, we all met up across the border in a town called Stranolar, that took me about a week to pronounce.  Right away, we connected.  We saw Boyles from Pittsfield even who we never see here.  There were Boyles from Australia and of course people from close by.  Lots of long talks, a little singing, and as always good food and did I mention Guiness?  

We then headed over to County Mayo and a town called Castlebar, (pronounced cas-el-bear, if you ever need to talk like an Irishman, or woman).  Mary was on the search for the home of family on her grandmother's side in a village which I can still barely mouth, Cloncundra.  (I finally figured out how to remember places like this - I took pictures of maps and road signs.)  The magic part of the trip came from Mary writing a letter to "the family of James and Ella Walsh" with an address that she found from her mother's address book, and a postal code that Joe googled.  Well, the day before leaving, she got an email from the niece of James and Ell who gave us her contact points and we arranged to meet.  Her niece, Ann, told us when we met, that the postal code was wrong but since one of her family worked in the post office, whoever was sorting gave the envelope to him, and the letter made its way to this, perhaps the smallest hamlet in Ireland.  I exaggerate of course, but you will never see its name on a map.  I did see a road sign.  

Well we found her grandmother's house, and spent a day touring around the area with Ann, packing in a church and a basilica (where the Pope had gone two days earlier), a pub (actually two, one of which where we celebrated Ann's birthday) , a museum, tea and scones, and a shop or two.  

From there, we headed on our own down a very sad road cutting over to Connemora, sad because it was completely desolate and because we learned of the fate of 600 people who walked a great distance to escape famine but whose plight was ignored when they reached the next town.  A memorial marker with a quote from a visitor, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, told the story.

On our last night, in Galway, we were walking back to our B&B when another touring couple, lost, probably from Italy, approached us and asked how to get to the center of the town.  We told them, and then they asked if there were any pubs there.  "PUBS? How many do you want?" was our answer.  Blocks and blocks of pubs.  How do you choose.  Fun.

When we got home, we had a mini Peace Corps reunion of sorts, and I finally got to cut the grass.

And we were able to keep up a little with all your happenings.  Wonderful photos of Everett on Facebook.  He's home and already more awake and alert, from the photos, it looks like.  Daniel finished his year of school and has a job at a high end men's salon with people who pay tons of money for what Pop paid $2.50 for in Putnam.  But then again, I bet they've never had a tripleheader - haircut, trip to the dump and Spag's.  Claire has started her job where she's the sole music teacher in a K-12 school in Michigan.  Sounds challenging; she's trying to raise money for instruments - read about it on her Facebook site.  Andrew and Lur took their grandchildren over Labor Day when Bill and Jen went to Pennsylvania to work on their new project - the mobile home/bus.

We also saw a lot of photos from Portugal where Leonor, and Thomas, were able to spend a couple of weeks with her family and friends.  Annie spent Labor Day with China friends in San Francisco and Margaret was getting ready for a short trip to Mexico.    

John and Marilyn were also traveling, on a cruise along the Rhine, which sounded very nice were it not for the fact that they may have had a series of mishaps on their flight over that caused them to be delayed for 9 hours, or was it even more?  

Sean and Erin are closing in on their big day, and we're looking forward to that, and to seeing all of you again.

Love from up here.  The photo below is of the Mary and Ann checking out the Walsh family house, the grandmother's stone house in the background and James and Ella Walsh in front. Mary visited here in 1973. 

 

Welcome Everett

A happy day it was when we learned of Everett Lee's arrival. And that the birth went so smoothly, perhaps even too smoothly, as I understand Tina wasn't in the hospital long before he took his first cry of air! We spoke with the excited grandparents who tell us that Everett's name comes from a dear family friend. Special. Already looking forward to the Poconos next year, and if we're lucky, maybe even before then to see Everett. And, of course Donald has a little brother and Oliver another little brother.

I have been waiting to write this as my computer is out of commission for the moment, but I couldn't wait any longer or it will be October. So I'm writing on an iPad. Does it make a difference? We'll see.

We've been happily and summer-ly busy since the Poconos, first with a visit from Annie who helped celebrate Mary's birthday and joined us for an evening at Tanglewood. My college roommate Steve was here with his wife for more Berkshire cultural things including Thursday morning French conversations at Edith Wharton's museum home.

Then we went up to Vermont where our car broke down about an hour away from our destination. What could have been a disaster turned out much better than expected as a series of fortuitous incidents and very nice people helped us get it towed and repaired at a much lower than expected price. Anyway, we enjoyed being with Charlie and Annie at their lake cabin.

And then, Thomas arrived. So did his parents. Joe and Leonor were here for almost a week and we had a grand grandparent time with toys and books and strolls and hugs. We managed to take Thomas to a Moby Dick marathon reading, that both his parents and grandmother read at. I should add that Thomas did not last 26 hours through the marathon reading but a respectable 30 mins or so. Margaret and Andrew arrived too late for that but they joined us the next day for a hike up Monument Mountain where Melville met Hawthorne! 168 years ago.

Not everything revolves around Melville, though, and we have gone to a movie (Eighth Grade), a play (West Side Story), a baseball game, King Kone, more hikes and swims and canoe rides, and golf games. It's been raining quite a bit but that hasn't dampened our ability to rest and relax. Margaret and Andrew took a few days off and went to the Rhode Island beaches, and stopped at Pomfret and the Vanilla Bean on the way back here. We got to watch D while they were gone!

Mary's brother Tim has moved back to Pittsfield with the aim of staying here in the glorious warm weather months and then head back to warmer climes at the first hint of snow. He's found an apartment in town, and we have seen quite a bit of him. We even ran into him at the hot dog ranch one night.

We see that Janet, and I think Peter, were in Atlanta for her annual conference on audio description. Out in Dundee, Claire is back home from her summer camp job, armed with a big bag of juicy peaches. She starts her new job soon, and we hear Daniel has his first job at a high end men's salon.

The other day, we were outside a coffee shop, on our way to Northampton for the day, and Mary said out of nowhere, "this is summer!" That captured how sunny, warm, carefree, content, green, everything was. Hope you are having a little, or a lot of that.

And welcome again to Everett! Did you hear someone say "Fantastic?"

Love from up here.

Vive la France!

We had a truly wonderful sixteen day trip to France, made possible in part by cashing in ten years of frequent flyer miles. We had a lot of Claude Monet (in Giverny, Rouen and three different museums in Paris), a lot of D-Day (Omaha and Utah Beaches, an American and a German cemetery and several museums), six glorious Loire Valley chateaux (Aizy-le-Rideau, Chambord, Chenonceaux, Amboise, Chaumont and Cheverny), Leonardo's tomb and last house (Amboise), some World Cup antics (I watched the Russia-Argentina penalty kicks courtesy of Johanna via Face-Timing her television), four full days in Paris and best of all for me, two of the most transcendentally beautiful holy places I will ever see, Mont Saint-Michel and the massive Chartres Cathedral.

We had interesting hotels and great meals. We drank rosè at every dinner. We went up and down endless spiral and irregular stairs and did a great deal of walking. Just about every Loire Valley chateau figured in a very long-running complicated feud between Catherine deMedici, a queen of France, and Diane de Poitiers, the king's mistress. I still can't figure it all out. We saw other Gothic masterpieces in Rouen, Bayeux and St-Chapelle in Paris. (Notre-Dame in Paris was ridiculously mobbed and we left.) The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry but an embroidery.

Our rental car's navigation system made some weird decisions and spoke with a proper English accent, and Janet named her Clementine, in honor of Winston Churchill's wife. We also experienced ample amounts of today's travel headaches: long delays at airports both ways, uncomfortable flights (why do they even bother to serve such awful food?), glitches on everything technological, a card problem with our bank, crowded Metro cars in Paris (Parisians still do not use deodorant). The weather was much hotter than the forecasts had predicted, but we had no rain on any day, thank goodness for that. When we spoke with people from England, or Belgium or Canada, their subject was, well, you-know-who, which was annoying (I usually answered "I'm on vacation," but we couldn't avoid the subject altogether).

The French:
- are polite drivers, who obey speed limits
- have well-maintained roads
- have way too many narrow roads
- do not rush meals, which in the U.S. would be called "poor service"
- will not bring you a meal check until you ask for it; it's considered an insulting request to leave if you are given the check without asking
- tolerate many many rude tourists
- are much more polite than their reputation
- do not believe in shower curtains
- believe in hand-held showers
- actually understood my French! (well, mostly)

It was the fifth time in France for each of us. We've seen all but a small portion. What made this trip work was planning, and not trying to do too much, so that it was relaxing and we were never in a hurry. About 75% of the trip went as planned and the rest are now stories.

Mt. Springs, the sequel

A week ago tonight, we were eating a wonderful dinner put together by the Paula-Lur-Melodie-David-Andrew-Jeffrey team.  Do you remember what it was?  

If you don't, that's okay since all three days folded into one another to make for a delightful time together, with so much packed into such a short period of time.

What were your highlights?  Ticket to ride, Asia?  Walks around the lake?  Fishing?  Saving Russians?  Catching up with cousins?  Meeting Thomas?  Swimming to the dock?  Teasing each other? Seeing and fleeing from a bear in the woods?  Eating non-stop?  Surviving the rainstorms?  Happy birthdays?  I know one that was not a highlight - hitting traffic on the way home, probably for each of us.

Here are a few observations.  

-- The noise level on the porch the first night surpassed the other two evenings, leaving me to conclude we were all enthusiastic about seeing one another again. 

-- We did miss Matthew and Tina, and are looking forward to seeing all their family next summer.  We'd also love to see Claire and Daniel out here again, and we hear that Bill and Jen have a bus/rv so maybe that would make it easier for them to come out next year.  

-- Small ones, like Donald a couple of years ago, and Thomas this year, are hard work for the parents but just wonderful for the rest of us, to engage in the silliest of ways, to stare at for hours on end, to try to get the smallest reaction from, in the form of a smile, a tongue sticking out, a wave, or a "bbbbbbbbb" of a car-type sound.  (That may be Thomas' first word.)

-- Mary and I weighed ourselves on Monday morning and saw numbers we had not seen since February.  It will be a long haul back, and we're still not making much progress (King Cone is to blame.)  I suspect we may not be the only ones who indulged these three days.

-- Mountain Springs has all the right arrangements of cabins and proximity to lake and each other that gives us, yet again, the freedom to get up and go to bed and nap when we want, to visit each other and even to hide from each other, if we need to.  No names.

-- There's a bit of familiarity with the place and the area so we almost feel like its "ours."  We know the drill and even know where the glasses are kept in the cupboards.

In all the chit chat, we learned about new jobs and highlights from those jobs; we learned of wedding plans; we heard about trips to France, and to Gabon; we talked a little politics, but not sure we learned anything new there; we cracked jokes and told stories.

All that said, we also signed up for another year.  Mark your calendars.  Thursday, July 18-Sunday July 21.  We have reserved five cabins, in the event we are able to lure everyone there.  

In the other stuff happens besides Mt. Springs, Annie prolonged her trip east and came back to Pittsfield with us for the week.  She just left on her way to a couple of nights in NYC before she heads back to Oakland on Sunday.  She did a little work here, and joined my college roommate Steve and his wife, for an evening at Tanglewood and a barbecue and more extended conversations.  She even got us over to the lake a few times for swimming, reminding us how we don't take advantage of that scene enough.  Also, Timmy showed up on Monday night, having decided to move back to the area, at least for the warmer months.  He's looking for a place to call his home over the next few weeks.  

And, this week is a new birthday week.  With Mary and Donald on the 24th and Thomas on the 29th.  There will be another one soon, a real birth-day, as we're awaiting news from Tina and Matthew.  Happy days to all of you.

It's hard to believe it's almost the end of July.  I saw a little golden rod, this week, but still no leaves turning, thankfully.  We want to slow down the time and enjoy the sandals and shorts weather.

So wonderful to see all of you.  The time passes so quickly on these three days together, but when we're in the middle of it, I somehow can't appreciate that it will have to come to an end. 

I can't leave on that sad note, so I'll just point out he obvious how we treasure the time together.  Love from up here.  

And check out these two pictures; first the posed one, and then the one waiting for instructions to pose.      

Dateline Rhode Island beaches

First of all happy birthday to Andrew and happy anniversary to Lur and
Andrew! Memories a very fun weekend in Illinois around that big
event!

More memories too as we drive around the beach towns in Rhode Island
where we had five summer vacations, with picnic suppers of lobster and
corn on the cob, squeezing into Grandma and Pop's station wagon with
children and beach accessories to save money on beach parking, walks
to see the snapping turtles at Trustom Pond, closing our eyes at
Moonstone Beach, dancing to Billy Joel with vacuum cleaners as air
guitars and mikes. We thought they would never end. Well, they
didn't; just a different venue: the Poconos!

Anyway, we came down for a weekend of beach, AAA baseball, good food
and good company. Staying at Marj and Lew's and continuing to explore
the area.

Joe tracked us down yesterday for a FaceTime chat with Thomas who took
his first independent step yesterday. We saw a few photos of him in
the pool yesterday. Leonor also had a bom anniversario last week.
(Excuse the bad translation for happy birthday.)

Annie also tracked us down as she was driving back to the Bay Area
from a weekend in LA, where she said the thermometer hit 118. She
said it felt like an exhaust fan blowing hot air. I bet that was even
hotter than it got in Florida, where John and Marilyn usually receive
the summer heat awards.

I think heat was a common theme for almost everyone, with the
exception of Peter and Janet who were blissfully unaware as they
toured around the French countryside, castles, cathedrals, museums and
good dining offerings! Quelle chance!

We had talked earlier with Margaret who recounted Washington heat
stories as well as Leonor's birthday party that Jeff and Melodie also
attended. Despite the heat we see photos of baseball games and porch
parties. Does anyone work? Why don't people post photos of work on
Facebook? I think I know the answer.

How was your 4th of July? I think I know the answer to that as well:
hot. It was hot at our parade, hot at fireworks and barbecue. Mary's
high school friend Judy joined us with her daughter Bridie and husband
Tom, who enjoyed a more rural respite from the eastern part of the
state.

The garden has been a little disappointing because of a family of
groundhogs who figured out how to squeeze through the fence holes.
So, I declared war, put out peppers, did my best imitation of farmer
Magregor (from Peter Rabbit) and then pulled out the two useless
haveahart traps in the basement. Final result, two young groundhogs
have a new home miles away, and the garden is coming back to life. I
was afraid my garden was going the way of Pop's who finally gave up
and just left the gate open.

Other big news: Claire got a job! Her first teaching job, in
Michigan, near Luddington. I know, she had been teaching, but that
was connected to her student teaching, I think. Anyway, what a
relief. We also saw a short video of her on Facebook playing a silly
game. Looks like fun.

We've been to Tanglewood a couple more times and I finished my summer
lecture requirements. And a few too many trips for ice cream!

This is what we wait for all year long. Summer! Hope yours is super enjoyable.

Love from up here.