Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

  It Makes No Difference And the sun don't shine anymore And the rains fall down on my door Now there's no love As true as the love that dies untold But the clouds never hung so low before - It Makes No Difference Robbie Robertson                 Sometimes when I let my imagination rove I picture my dad running across a Montana wheat field, dark brown dirt under his fingernails, hair tousled, and long summer days where the only rule his parents laid out was, “Be home by dark.” In summers, in Montana, darkness came closer to midnight than regular dinner time hours. I imagine as the long day wound down, my dad sitting down next to a small fire, Montana cowboys and sheepherders telling stories, smoking cigarettes, and singing songs.   And I’m sure their voices cracked and sang off tune, and maybe the songs were traditional and passed down from generation to generation and may have sounded not unli...

Overview:   In June, around the Summer Solstice, my wife, my dog, and I set out to hike the Albuquerque Bosque from end to end over two days .  It was well over a hundred degrees and after starting later than expected we didn't make it as far the first day as we hoped.  But we did make it. Now, three months later, around the Autumnal Equinox, we set out to do it again.  Our route was slightly different and, with the weather being a lot more pleasant, broke the day into a thirteen mile day and a five mile day:  eighteen total miles from Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge to the Alameda Bridge right on the border between Albuquerque and Corrales. The things we wanted to do differently this time were pretty straightforward:  1) don't get lost at the south terminus and get into the bosque sooner, and 2) walk even more on the westside.  So, the route was a follows:  we'd walk on the east side from Valle de Oro to the Rio Bravo Bridge, cro...

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint.  With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later).      So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan.  I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something.  She was happy.  This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different.  She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge.  And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...