Going, Going …

Back home with a brief travelogue and a few observations to share.

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My iMac perched on the desk in my daughter Lee and her partner Rick’s home office in the Hudson Valley region of New York. They had scooted their iMac over to accommodate me when they opened guest quarters for my visit with my husband, Vincent Mancuso, and our 13-year old cat.

Nature

As I started this blog in their nearly 100-year old house nestled in woodsy acres, I gazed out at a tangle of tree limbs crisscrossing each other in abandon. Nature being natural. Leaves rustled in trees around the property, more golden as time marched toward the end of our stay.

An electric company work crew arrived on their road to clip, chip and haul away branches dangling over wires, foiling the usual suspects from perpetrating a power outage with the first snow. Walking down the road beyond the crew, I waved to a woman as she corralled a toddler on a sloping lawn, and in the course of an hour, watched one car drive by.

Beneath the rustling leaves and cawing blue jaws, admiring the houses of weekenders from the Big Apple and of heirs to families who settled the area in the 1700s, I was delighted this is the environment my loved ones inhabit. Here they plant and pick a season’s bounty, spoil purring pets, hike the ridge called Shawangunk, bike a rail trail and pamper us.

We spent time with Connecticut kin who opted for a similarly bucolic existence. A lake on one end of their road served as the backdrop for impromptu children’s picnics. Deer ambled by, flicking white tails. A dairy farm on the opposite end of the road is equally peaceful. I would not be surprised if (like the internet video of a saxophonist performing for a herd of cows) my 13-year old grandson arrived at the farm with his sax one day to stir its slumbering music lovers.

Human Nature

A stay at our favorite New York cottage capped this 2019 country quiet, and it merged with our life among the masses – first at JFK and Copenhagen international airports, then Copenhagen train stations and then ports of a ship bound from Denmark to Norway, Scotland, Ireland, Nova Scotia and Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Humans on the move are something to behold, crisscrossing the planet. We utter a mixed-tape Babel of languages, play distinctive music, savor fragrant cuisines, don all manner of fashion. We tend to get along - as far as I observed. Nature being good nature, apparent when we joined an international crowd visiting Edinburgh Castle, high atop volcanic Castle Rock, a site first inhabited in the Iron Age and by Scottish monarchs across the centuries.

And, when we left the ship in Dublin to tour Powerscourt, one of the world's great gardens, the bark of a single redwood tree planted 200-years ago seemed as stunning a reminder of our Earth's beauty as a space station view of the planet.

Observations on a Storm Crossing

Aboard the Regal Princess, a ship as long as the Chrysler Building is tall and carrying nearly 5,000 international passengers and crew, we headed west across the Atlantic Ocean. The experienced captain set a course between two hurricanes, and, during one phase of the crossing, he ordered the ship's fog horn to blow every few minutes, a reminder of the perils of the sea. The captain also drew a packed audience to his lecture about navigating the North Atlantic using international forecast resources.

Swells rising around the huge ship proved to be a startling sight; yet passengers settled in to read or play trivia or board games; hit the gym or track, met for dinner and cocktails; filed into the theater to watch a show or a lounge to hear the classical trio or dance; and set the casino’s slot machines to pinging. They also got along.

Unprecedented Aberration

So, how do we account for the recent isolationist America rhetoric spewed in - of all places - the United Nations General Assembly? And how does any adult, let alone the leader of the free world, mock a teenage girl defending the science of a shared planet?

United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called this period of history an aberration. It's a departure from the norm created when some voters reportedly figured they'd, "Gave the other guy a chance." We awaken each day to face the latest "unprecedented" aberration from the other guy.

It's reported one-third of Americans read his tweets, 10,000+ official communications from a president, dense with lies and cruel remarks unbecoming his office. Two-thirds of us groan and ask what will it take for his wilting party to stand up for the country. We can see abandoning global allies is perilous and consequential. And, laughing off environmental alarms seems as reckless as charting a course into a hurricane with a joker in the wheelhouse.

Of course, September’s preposterous departure from reality is old news. What we hear now are his "jokes" that strain credulity. And threats of civil war if anyone dares to right this ship of state.

As Americans plan their 2019 Thanksgiving celebrations, they may just sigh, “Catch you in 2020.”