Trips start with me saying the name of a country three times while hopping up and down on my left foot, twice.
There are 195 countries in the world, according to Wikipedia. I can’t see them all, in this lifetime, so I usually choose countries to visit that look warm and friendly, have good pictures from people who have been there, and good reviews by fellow travelers.
Sometimes friends and family give me their dream vacations.
Pat, who keeps Scotttreks.com flying with tech genius, suggested the Dolphin Fountain in Mazatlan, all the five star restaurants in Paris, the Great Barrier Reef for diving. In the Dominican Republic he likes LaRamada, the north side beaches, the grave of Christopher Columbus, Altos de Chavon and Casa de Campo.
To celebrate my ninth travel ring, I buy myself a brand new Dominican Republic guide book at Barnes and Noble, full of places to see, foods to sample, music to tap my foot too, places to hang my hat.
There are 195 perfect countries on this planet to visit, thousands of cool places to explore, and friendly hospitable people in all of them..
Scott is getting ready to ramble, once again, but hopping three times is getting difficult
I wish I had a magic carpet to make getting there and back home as easy as Mom’s apple pie with a big scoop of ala mode.
” Tumbling Tumbleweeds” is a Roy Rodgers cowboy song, sung around the campfire with fellow cowhands on a starry night, with a crackling fire, when the herd is quiet and coyotes are howling harmony.
The song’s lyrics are plaintive as the western landscapes shared by cowboys, Indians, outlaws, and cattle.
” See them tumbling down/Pledging their love to the ground/Lonely, but free, I’ll be found/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.
Cares of the past are behind/Nowhere to go, but I’ll find/Just where the trail will wind/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.
I know when night has gone/That a new world’s born at dawn/I’ll keep rolling along/Deep in my heart is a song/Here on the range I belong/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds… ”
The last lines of the song crawl into my tent and bite me.
We all have songs to sing, but tumbling is what I like to do the most.
The map on one of the Starbuck’s walls shows several continents.
When you spread the world out, pin it to a wall, you take out all its bumps, contours, unknowns, inconsistencies.
When Columbus laid out his world map on the sturdy table in his Captain’s quarters his map didn’t show him his crew’s fears, terrible ocean squalls and rolling waves taller than the three little ships in his expedition, stacked one atop the other..
When John Glenn walked on the moon, the maps in NASA headquarters didn’t tell the consistency of the sand that he hit his golf ball off of.
This world map focuses on longitudes and latitudes best suited for growing coffee, just one of Starbuck’s many products.
Our world has knitted together so tightly that we can enjoy foods from far away, foods that Kings used to have difficulty procuring. Now we don’t have to travel to a coffee zone to enjoy fresh coffee.
This little girl is talking to her mother on her Apple wrist phone. The only person on the planet using wrist communication devices when I was her age was the newspaper comic strip hero – Dick Tracy. Kids have come a long way since the 50’s.
What new technologies will come true in this little girl’s lifetime?
This morning I’m reflective.
It is good to have children in our world but they have to grow up quicker than we did.
Girls like to sing the blues too.
Their blues are mostly about guys that don’t leave quick enough or stay long enough, guys who can’t make up their minds and stick with what they finally decide on, guys who drink too much or not enough, guys who are running around looking for thrills when thrills are right there at home.
Blues seem to come with human territory and the girls, tonight, are putting on a good show for friends and guests at the jam.
When the place closes down and everyone goes home, some here will meet the blues first hand, and probably have a drink in their hand.
Meeting our own and other’s expectations is often difficult.
For things to work out, a whole lot of tangibles and intangibles have to be rowing in the same direction
My last conversation with a skeleton was at an Albuquerque Starbucks, on Halloween.
Before that, I shared a sidewalk bench one sunny afternoon, with a man of bones in Tulum, Mexico.
Today, outside the Kaktus Brewing Company in Bernalillo, New Mexico, another set of bones greets me.
I wouldn’t swear to it but I believe this skeletons right toe is tapping to the music in perfect four four time.
Good blues can bring back the dead, but they often make us feel like we want to die first.
It’s always bad luck to walk past a skeleton without tipping your hat.
Bernalillo is a small rural town just north of Albuquerque.
The town has some dirt roads, manufactured homes in disrepair, livestock grazing in back yards, Obama signs in front yards.
The Rio Grande River and the Bosque, a cottonwood forest, flow through town on their way to Mexico.
By the freeway, on the South Hill frontage road, is the Kaktus Brewery.
The brewery itself has taken over an old fashioned 1950’s house and modified it to fit the business needs of a 2019 craft brewery. What used to be someone’s bedroom has become a brewing area. In the bar, through what used to be a living room door, I can see an older group of pony tailed fans, men and women, drinking. The blues jam is happening in the back patio area where previous owners barbecued ribs and listened to Mozart.
Blues, as I usually think of them, belong on a front porch in Mississippi on a hot humid evening. An old black man sits on the edge of his porch, guitar strings sticking up like copperheads from the river. He hits a few chords and then his sad story comes out. The old man’s old favorite hound lays on a corner of the porch, his tail tapping the wood deck as his master’s knarled fingers move across the guitar frets.
Women light the place up tonight and their blues are always about sex and love getting in each other’s way.
The vibe at the Kaktus tonight is partly spiritual, partly venal, but mostly party.
Teaching and playing are different disciplines.
Some musicians play. Some musicians teach. Some musicians both play and teach.
There are lots of filters that can keep a teacher’s message from reaching his students gas tank. If Chadd could just run a USB from his brain to my brain, he could download his considerable music knowledge and we wouldn’t have to wait for me to go through hours and hours of practice.
At the heart of every jazz solo is technique, clarity of thought, pureness of emotion, and an intent to swing.
There is, unfortunately, no USB connection that can bypass practice.
My attempts to master flute playing have been unsuccessful.
Chadd tells me the oboe is the hardest instrument to play he has ever tried.
I’m stuck with alto sax and clarinet, my original horn.
Right now, playing one horn well is about all the gas I have left in my tank.
Right now, listening to Chadd play a flute solo, is as close to the flute as i want to be.
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If you want to know what people are looking for, count the cars in the parking lot. Tonight, the parking lot is packed.
The dance floor is also packed,dancers barely having enough room to stand. The band is hitting their notes, ladies are dressed to kill, the audience rocks with the steady booming salsa rhythm and yell when a tune is done for another one just like it. Latin music has hot harmony, high note trumpet playing, fluid solos and tight, intricate, group ensembles.
When Ladies get dressed up to dance salsa, they light up the dance floor and have smiles that are contagious.
Tonight, this is a party to be at, especially if you are a little kid on the bandstand.
I thought, at first,the little boy on the band stand was the son of a band member but was told his parents have been bringing him to sing and be on the stage since he was three.
Watching the little boy sing with the band is worth the price of admission.
It never hurts to start any passion early, before you are told you can’t do it and you best find something more serious to do with your time and energy.
This rock, more than a stone but not a boulder, in Embudo Canyon in the Albuquerque foothills, has been moved onto the trail, by something other than wind, water or wishes.
It appears to have been lifted from a nearby mound of dirt. Where the rock used to be, on the mound, is a small hole that matches it’s size perfectly.
” Let’s move it back, ” Alex laughs.
If we move the rock back will some cosmic order be disturbed? Has moving rocks become against the law in an open space monitored by cameras and posted signs? Maybe the rock likes it here closer to the trail and doesn’t want to go back to where it was?
We keep walking quickly through this crime scene.
This situation has man’s dirty fingerprints all over it and I’m not putting things right.
Not wanting to get involved is a perfectly normal thing to do these days.
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