Officially qualified

Well, we graduated. We can square dance now. (We actually have another eight weeks of plus level classes) (but who's counting?) It's definitely an old person's thing in West LA at least. The youngest person in our class id probably 55.  As we travel doing this stuff, I'm hoping we'll find younger people- like out in the valley or east somewhere. The graduation ceremony was a little like the initiation ceremony for the Boy Scout Troop. Except with the Boy Scout Troop you get blind-folded and the other boys make animal sounds as they walk you in. The guy in black in the middle was / is the caller / teacher. If you're gonna do this, find him. He's probably the best teacher around. The Red Ribbons in Santa Monica is the place to go.

New Old Bike

When my tired old bike died a year and half ago, I looked around and decided that I couldn't afford a $1,000.00 bike right now (then). So I ordered a bike from an internet mail order firm for $250.00. It's worked ok, except that it was made very cheaply and made noise and now creaks badly every time I get on it. So, I started looking on Craig's List, thinking of something else. A guy had a 60CM bike for sale in Carson. So I tooled off there at lunch time. He had sold the one he advertised, but in the back of his pile he had a 65CM Peugeot that is/ was about 25 years old. The frame was still in one piece, so for $100.00 it was mine. I had a new derailer, new chain, new tires put on and the handlebars taped. I added a water bottle holder with pipe clamps from Home Depot. It feels like I'm a grown up suddenly with a grown up bike that actually fits my oversized mcnay frame. Still working on getting used to it. It has the very old style brake handles and a set of narrow (by today's standards) racing handlebars. I've not quite figured how to ride it up my 1/2 mile hill on the way home, but I'll get it eventually. It looks better that the thing here, but it feels good. And it doesn't ache like an old rocking chair.

I'm a bit confused

This are what I'm reading lately. Theroux hates the South Pacific, but he's going through a divorce and its a form of self punishment I think. Twain, is of course, a thousand years old spiritually and remembering his entire life for us. And McClure is just twenty and self loathing and doing a lot of dope and alcohol just like we did in 1970. Now I remember why I liked the beats. Probably the only keeper is ole Sam.

The crack

It was a boarding house above Cannery Row- around 1976. I was working as a janitor at the Hotel Carlos downtown Monterey. I had the only room upstairs that had two doors. One went to the hallway, one went outside to the outside stairs. Tim had a back corner room which had a wall that looked like this. He was working  cleaning fish down the hill. He had just come back to Monterey and wanted to go back to the community college  there. He was a musician and a painter. Had tried to ride the rails a year before and fallen and had broken his leg in three different places and had to go hang out in his old bedroom in his parents house in the midwest to mend. We had a little one night and decided that his room needed an abstract painting to hide this ugly crack. We started painting the wall and it brew and grew until the painting finally took over the entire wall. Several nights later, we had to move his desk to finish the wall. It really was abstract expressionistic. He found a house in Pacific Grove and with a third guy moved in. He bough a Vibraphone and taught himself to play it while I wrote the Great American Novel upstairs night after night. My girl friend hated him and I had to move out to keep her. Never saw him after that. I don't remember his last name. So its kind of hard to track him down, even with the internet. He played nice.   

Narrative for the Grand Canyon

It's a big climb down. I ride my bike most every day back and forth from work, about six miles- I have a huge hill to climb every evening coming home- so I'm in pretty good shape for 59. I've never been a fanatic or a super jock type of guy. I don't do gyms or workout stuff. I do yoga once a week so I can get up off the floor. Going down was painful. I have a little arthritic stuff going on in my left knee and in both feet. Going down I was thinking "Shin Splints" and "Water On The Knee" and wanted to be able to finish the trip so I slowed down a whole lot. A lot of aches and pains I don't think I've felt in a while. We had left at noon to start down, so there was no lunch break, so we had seven miles to go to get to the first camp.

Anyway, its 130 degrees in the sun down there and 100 in the shade. There a creek that runs the whole distance beside you (from the North Rim)  and the three 17 year old guys we were with spent a lot of their time there in their down time. I floated in it the afternoon we stayed at the bottom for a day and it was paradise.

The second day was another trek from the Cottonwood Camp to the Angel Campground that was 1/4 mile from the Colorado. Another 7 miles. I had a bit of heat exhaustion by the time I got there and immediately passed out, with my head on my backpack for about an hour after reaching the camp space.

We were actually a day ahead of our permit for being there and did have a problem the last day as we were coming out. We thought it might be cool to get back home a day early and have a whole weekend to recoup. Nobody hassled us the first night. Yosemite Rangers don't ask to look at your permit. I've been backpacking in Yosemite the last five years. Grand Canyon guys make it into this big deal. The guy came into the camp at the bottom and naturally assumed that the four guys I was with were separate from me because I had the long hair and didn't have a tent. We were a day ahead of ourselves and in a group campsite that was supposed to accommodate 7 or more and we had only five. I made up a cock and bull story about we started down and didn't realize until we had gotten down the first day that we had out dates mixed up and that we were supposed to have three more people but they had started on the right day and were behind us.

He had to go make a phone call. He came back and changed all the dates on my permit and said we were ok, but we had to clean up our food and get it into the metal shell boxes they had in each camp to protect the food from the squirrels. They have to be experts on something.

There is running water and toilets and no bears and no mosquitoes.

Coming out, halfway out, the Ranger didn't believe that the Ranger down below had changed all the dates on the permit because he didn't initial it. I had also did my little convoluted story about our original mistake of coming in a day day early and about our missing other three people that never showed and we tried to call from the Colorado camp and etc. He had to go make a phone call. He came back and made us move out of the group camp site, mostly because there was a party of 11 that showed up and wanted it. He said it was a double booking and we were made to sleep on the helicopter landing site pad which was mostly gravel. And before he left he proceeded to confirm that we were going to carry out our trash.

They just weren't built for us folks that didn't respect the rules much.

The views were grand. The day hikes were better if you started at five and finished by 11:00 am. My buddy and I talked and talked and talked. There were deer all over the place by the river. I stuck my tootsies the Colorado.

Coming out we were adopted by a girl (mid-twenties) who was just bored with walking by herself. She worked at the South Rim and had decided the walk from rim to rim and back in her days off for the hell of it. She had finished college, but was park hopping from server to server job just for the hell of it. She had encountered a mountain lion on the trail the night before and hid in the bushes for a couple of hours. She walked with us until a guy appeared that was her age and who was walking in the same direction and was another staffer somewhere.

The people out there all were nice. Some of the folks that were at the river came down on horseback and were staying in little cabins and got to ride out. You can buy a beer at the bottom.

Probably won't go back. But its worth seeing once!

Pics of the Trip- Down to the Colorado and back

The Littlest Things

I got back yesterday. The boy bear was gone off to his new job and new apartment in Maryland. I took down posters from his bedroom wall he didn't want any more. Tried to decide which if any of the multitude of youth sports trophies to keep and which to toss. He would get them for everything he did. He didn't put them in the box of things he wanted us to store. Found a published book from their middle school years that was a collection  made by their poetry teacher of the middle school kids. This was his:

"Today you become a man!"
he exclaimed,
and chuckled.
I laughed too
even though I didn't get it
like it was a quote from a book
I hadn't read,
He seemed to bring it back
from his vast memory.
He watched me through his weary eyes
timeworn and kind.
He looked down on me,
one of the only people that could do so,
and smiled.
He handed me the electric drill.
My eyes widened.
I was seven.

-Chris McNay

I'd fake yell behind them the first time they would squeeze the rigger on the drill. The cub scouts were making sort of abstract wooden animals and I was giving them a taste of power tools under closely watched supervision of course.
And finding this, about me, kind of made me choke up yesterday in the nearly empty room.
His room was next to the kitchen and he had rice paper screens on a window in between. He always wanted the kitchen light on at night, even as a college student home for the summer (even with a guest with him for the night). We can turn the light out now.