Category: Personal

Today (June 23) marked our 43rd anniversary. Our “big” celebration will be at the Safari Supper at the Wild Animal Sanctuary. We’ll be dining with 40-50 others on the ground floor of the Bolivian Lion House. That location means we could have a number of rescued lions as part of our company. Depending on which table we choose we could be next to one of our adoptees: either Leo II or Gigi. While, thanks to sturdy fencing, our adoptees won’t be joining us at the table, it could get a bit noisy.

However, we thought we’d at least celebrate the day by a delicious, if not particularly healthy, lunch at the Lariat Lounge Brewing Company. The food was good and substantial (Dorie Ann is holding our leftovers for tomorrow morning’s breakfast.) The beer was also excellent. But the major treat of that adventure was revisiting the Evergreen Conference Center which is where the Lariat Lounge is located.

For much of its existence the Evergreen Conference Center was run by the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado. It hosted hundreds of youth over the years in summer camps. It was best known as the home of the Evergreen School of Church Music, drawing renowned composers, hymn writers, choir directors, and various musicians from across the country and overseas. When we moved to Evergreen in 1989, they hired Dorie Ann to be bookkeeper for the Center. Later that year, the diocese sold the Center to Episcopal Renewal Ministries. They were looking for such a venue to host their newly developed Leadership Training Institute. Dorie Ann was kept on as bookkeeper for the Center and ERM as well.

In the years ERM ran their LTI at the Conference Center many Episcopal clergy experienced renewing, and even life-changing, encounters with Jesus Christ. However, a change in leadership prompted ERM to relocate in Georgia and the Center was sold. It went through a couple more changes in ownership until it became the Lariat Lounge.

It was great to visit the place. Even though the interior has been radically redesigned, there are still echoes of the many lives blessed in its former years.

Saturday, May 14, marked the 44^th anniversary of my ordination as a deacon. I almost missed it. We were rather preoccupied at the time, having traveled nearly 150 miles northeast to the town of Sterling, Colorado to officiate at a wedding. We drove there on Friday for the rehearsal and the wedding was mid-afternoon on Saturday. That meant we had some time to kill before things got busy. So what does one do in Sterling, Colorado on a balmy May morning?

There was a pleasant small park next to the hotel, but one lap around the park and its pond took very little time. Some searching on Google maps revealed another, larger park a short drive away and we soon headed there. Though we were just across a street from an industrial area, the park itself was in a lovely residential area. There were lots of cottonwood trees – one of the few trees that can thrive in the high plains desert. Those trees can grow to a fairly substantial size even in that arid climate. When those trees come to the end of their lifespan, they are prone to dropping large branches or even toppling over.

As we perambulated around the park we came across an unusual sight.

What had been a large dying cottonwood had been transformed into a wonderful sculpture by a local artist nearly four decades earlier. The sculpture was titled “Skygrazer.”

Not only was the sculpture a beautiful work of art, but the plaque held a small surprise in its text.

There’s probably several other things to do in Sterling on a Saturday morning, but for us, it was a refreshing moment and a good reminder of what my ordained life is supposed to be about.

[Dorie Ann – but now with an update from Jack] 20 years ago on Memorial weekend Jack suffered an unfortunate encounter with a jointer and lost the tops of 3 fingers on his left hand. Alas, he was wearing his wedding ring at the time so the ER medics had to cut it off. We did have it repaired but all the Florentine ornamentation and the inscriptions disappeared in the process. For years around our anniversary we’ve talked about getting new ones but I hated the thought of replacing my wedding ring. As our 40^th anniversary approached I began to wonder if it would be possible to combine the gold in our old rings and make them anew. I even decided that the new inscription should be 6/23/79 and our joint monogram with the S slightly larger than the J and the D. A local jeweler examined them and thought he could do it but wasn’t sure about the larger S. He’d give it his best shot. The attached photos show the result. Since our anniversary lands on a Sunday this year we picked a church that includes weekly wedding anniversary blessings and asked the Rector if he would bless our new old rings at the same time. So this Sunday will be very special to me.

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The other photos are somewhat related to the event.

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We were married at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Morehead, KY. That little church had a rock garden filled with potted plants that parishioners would bring in the Spring and take back home in the Fall to care for them over the winter. My sister, Kathie, liked that idea and bought a small prayer plant the day before our wedding to add to the garden. It was to commemorate the baptism of her son, Dylan, baptized by Jack on June 22^nd. We took it home that Fall and have tended it ever since. It moved with us back to Lexington in 1981 and to Delaware in 1983. It survived driving through a blizzard on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in March 1989 as we moved it to Evergreen. It abided at 35^th Avenue Court, then Trinity Episcopal Church, then West 22^nd Street Road in Greeley. Now this well-traveled plant is back in Evergreen for who knows how long. Long may it thrive. (The black and white kitty is Pippin whose new favorite pastime is terrorizing the many hummingbirds who visit our feeders. She does this by launching herself at the bay window to frighten them off. They always come back. Some cats never learn.)

[Jack] Since Dorie Ann began with the rings and ended with the cat, I’ll start with cats and end with rings. During our engagement Dorie Ann was living in her house in Lexington and I in the vicarage in Morehead, some 65 miles away. On the weekends she would drive up and stay with the Bishop’s Warden and his wife next door. She also brought her two cats, Squeak, a very gentle tortoiseshell and Frisbee, a part Russian Blue with the personality of Attila the Hun. At the end of the visit she would try to pack them back into their traveling carrier. I said “try” because with each return, Frisbee would become more combative to the point where I finally offered to keep them with me in Morehead. Love makes us do crazy things. Mind you, I had nothing against cats. But I had nothing for them either. The three of us lived in a watchful truce until Dorie Ann and I married and she moved to Morehead. During that interim period I had to perform a daily task I had sworn to avoid — cleaning the litter box. Forty years later, that’s still my job. Did I mention that love makes us do crazy things?

So much for cats, now on to the rings. Dorie Ann is not that much of a jewelry person so we settled on simple gold band with the Florentine decoration. On Memorial Day Weekend (a traditional time for men to cut off body parts doing home projects), I caught my left hand in a jointer and lost the tops of my fingers. Because of my liturgical training, it was the tops of three fingers, being also Trinity Sunday weekend. The wounds have long since healed, even though I’m a bit short handed. My ring never fully recovered. The newly recast rings are quite striking, more so that our originals. For both of our future well being I’ve given up home remodeling as a hobby. I am still, however, cleaning cat boxes.

Yesterday we bid a reluctant farewell to Sianna, our 10 year old Maine Coon mix. She had been her normal alternating affectionate/tetchy self as of last Saturday night. Sunday morning she didn’t show up for breakfast — a very unusual occurrence. Dorie Ann finally found her hunkered down in the lower compartment of a 2 story cat condo I’d made over 20 years ago. Sunday night Dorie Ann put her food in the compartment beside her as she didn’t want to come out. Monday morning she had moved location to the back of Dorie Ann’s closet, having nibbled only a bit of the food. We took her to the vet Monday afternoon and her blood tests show that her kidneys were severely compromised. We left Sianna with the vet overnight while they gave her fluids via an IV. On Tuesday her levels were even worse. After visiting her we decided to try one last thing, a diuretic that takes about 12 hours in kick in, hoping that would restart the kidneys. A little after 7a Wednesday morning the Vet called to tell us the deterioration continued and recommended euthanasia. We had really wanted to take her home and do a sort of feline palliative care, but without the IV the symptoms of her kidney failure would become more painful and traumatic. To complicate matters, Wednesday was one of our volunteer sessions at the Wild Animal Sanctuary and we leave town about 10:30a to get there, check in and get our assignments.

Wednesday morning at 9:45a we drove to the vet’s and said our farewells. By 10:20a she was gone.

Farewell, Sianna, and thanks for the love.

There is a difference between a trip and a pilgrimage. Trips are very efficient, very American. I’m at point A. My destination is point M. A trip gets me between the two points as quickly and predictably as possible. Distractions like security lines at airports or road construction on freeways are irritations to be endured and have no other meaning. Whatever points B, C, D through L are – that’s irrelevant.

Not so with a pilgrimage. That is a journey where each point from start to finish has its own significance. It is a spiritual exercise in which, by attending to God, one can pay attention to sights, events and encounters that will give shape and meaning to the various points between the start of the journey and its completion.

So how does that work out on a train trip? It began with a desire to visit my wife’s family in the Portland, Oregon area. We do this every other year (mostly) and most of the time we drive. There are three different routes we’ve used, each with its own plusses and minuses. One thing each route has in common is that the many hours of driving are tedious and uncomfortable and when we return we’re in need of a vacation to recover from our vacation. Air travel is much more efficient, generally less costly, bland, meaningless in terms of view and terrain and distance and, thanks to our economic values, ultimately dehumanizing.

So if one wants to actually relax, decompress and engage the size and scope of this earth at a more humane pace, one takes a train. (Only, of course, if one’s destination is one of the continually declining areas that have train service.) Train travel can be done by coach. But unless one is on for a short commute and is reasonably young and limber it’s better to bypass coach and get a compartment. Yep, they’re more expensive but it does include the meals. You have two seats facing each other by the window, which means one of you will be looking back and the other forward. After all, you can change places if you need a change. In the evening the attendant will convert the seats into a horizontal platform for the lower bed, and pull the upper bed into place, arranging the mattress and sheets and blankets for your night’s rest. As a warning, the quarters are tight and climbing into bed requires some contortionist exercises. There is a restraint that hooks between the bottom of the upper bed and the roof of the compartment to prevent you from rolling out of bed in the night.

Once you do manage to get into the upper bed you will soon discover that there’s a reason we rock babies to sleep. The vibration of the train over the tracks does have a soporific effect. The primary downside of sleeping like this on a train is one does tend to wake up when we make a station stop or have to pull aside for a freight train. Sleeping cars generally provide four or five bathrooms (about the size of one on an airplane) and one shower. Taking a shower while the train is rocking along the tracks can be a challenge, but the shower does have a seat and some grip bars for relative safety. In addition to the roomettes there are a few “bedrooms” which have a bit more space, can sleep three and have a small sink. Each sleeper car also has one “family bedroom” that can sleep five and has a shower as well. On this trip a gentleman in a wheel chair had the family bedroom* in our car on the Zephyr and a young family of five had the equivalent room on the Coast Starlight.

There is a bit of interaction as one moves around the rail car. Given the narrow halls and the rocking motion you can find yourself paying a surprise call on your neighbors as you move through the car. However the real place of connection is the dining car. As I mentioned, meals are included with a sleeper fare. Coach passengers pay separately. With the large number of folks traveling, seating in the dining car is at a premium and no seat can be allow to go unfilled. The result is that you end up sharing your meal with fellow passengers on a random basis (unless you are part of a party of four).

We had lunch Friday with a couple from West Virginia who had taken The Cardinal to Chicago and the California Zephyr heading for Grand Junction. From there they were renting a car to drive northern Colorado from Meeker along US 40 through Grand Lake, across Trail Ridge Road and through the Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park back to Denver. They would reboard and return to West Virginia by train.

Two other meals were shared with Australians from the Perth area taking an extended train tour of the US. Each of these encounters brought some light and vitality to the journey. There’s much more yet to share for the Coast Starlight has yet to reach Portland, but the rest will come later.

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*There is no way to make the Amtrak cars ADA compliant. Each car is a double decker and access from car to car is only on the upper level. With no elevator and no room to put one in, a person’s inability to climb stairs traps them in their lower level compartment for the duration of their trip. The car attendant brought the meals to our traveler but the rest of train life was inaccessible to him.

June 20, late afternoon

One of the things we enjoyed about the California Zephyr (back in the 1980s when we rode it several times) was its timing.We’d get on in Chicago in the afternoon, sleep through western Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and the northeastern plains of Colorado. Denver was the first stop of the waking day and we were able to enjoy a leisurely ride through the Rockies. Evening fell as we crossed into Utah for a long stop at Salt Lake City while the Desert Wind and the Pioneer broke off for LA and Portland respectively. We slept through western Utah and the salt flats and pretty much all of northern Nevada, waking to a peaceful desert dawn just northeast of Reno. From Reno we began our climb up the Sierra Nevada mountains along the Truckee river. The train arrived at Oakland in the afternoon so our last sight before deboarding was the Bay.

However, in trains, as in comedy, timing is everything. The Union Pacific Railroad, our so-called “host” for our journey seemed to take a positive delight in making a bad situation worse with frequent sections of track deemed hot spots over which we could travel only at a leisurely 10 mph. Adding to that were a couple of long stops in the middle of nowhere because freight trains up the line were higher priority. Ironically, one of the delays was due to the westbound Zephyr which was running seven hours late. This was not entirely due to Union Pacific. Sadly, someone had committed “suicide by train” early on in the route. Where we met the westbound Zephyr there were no side tracks, but there was a short spur where we could pull off. We’d have to back out onto the track again to resume our journey. That delay only added about 25 minutes to our lateness but given all the other delays we were close to five hours behind. Instead of reaching Salt Lake City at 11 pm we finally arrived at 4:05 am. That meant our scenery for the day was salt flats and scrub desert. We’ve driven that route before and knew it all too well. But while the driving is tedious and seems interminable you have the very work of driving to distract you from the scenery and you can drive faster than Amtrak can.

Fortunately we were able to navigate the Sierra Nevada route in daytime and pulled into Sacramento only 4 1/2 hours late. Since we had an 11+ hour layover waiting for the Coast Starlight that really wasn’t a problem. Thus at the end of the first day of train travel in 20+ years we were reminded at, at least in the US, one doesn’t travel by train just to get from point A to point B. You’ve gotta like trains. But given what I’ve shared so far, it may not sound like there’s anything to like. Just wait for my next installment for a more positive view.