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Faulty Little Gray Cells

Posted in aging, Books, Journeys, Travel, Writing, tagged Rick Steves, Steve Reeves, Travel writing on December 8, 2023| 1 Comment »

***One of Rick Steves many travel books about European countries.***

Aging My Way

Reading and Googling go hand in hand for me these days. It’s one of the good things about the internet. No longer do I have to wait to go to the library to find answers to my questions, all I have to do is type them into a search engine.

It helps, however, if you know the right questions to ask.

This morning I was reading an essay in Best American Travel Writing of 2020 about Rick Steves. The author didn’t immediately identify Steves except by name, and so I Googled him. Only from the short time I went from the page to my phone screen I goofed and typed in Steve Reeves.

That was a blast to my past. During my younger days, I had watched Reeves, a bodybuilder and actor, portray such characters as Hercules in movies many times. But I quickly realized he probably wasn’t the person I was looking for and a quick glance back at the book informed me of my mistake.

Googling the correct name, I discovered Rick Steves is a popular American travel writer famous for his European travel guides. I guess. because I’ve never visited Europe, is why I had never heard of Steves, even though the article by Sam Anderson described him as an amazing person and writer.

Meanwhile, I’m still wondering how my little gray cells jumped from Rick Steves to Steve Reeves. My guess is that at 84, and always being insatiably curious, those cells of mine are densely crowded, allowing wires to easily get crossed. At least I hope that’s all it is.

I wonder if the internet has something to say about that.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.

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One Is Not Like the Other

Posted in aging, Birds, Books, Journeys, Travel, tagged Petra, Susan Orlean on November 13, 2023| 1 Comment »

***The Monastery in Petra, a place that has fascinated me ever since I got a sneak peek at it in an Indiana Jones movie. Photo by Diego Delso***

Aging My Way

I do a lot of armchair traveling these days, looking at photos of and reading about places, which at 84, I know I will probably never be able to visit in person. It’s an enjoyable hobby that continues to feed my insatiable curiosity about the world and the people who live in it.

What’s lacking, however, is the feeling of accomplishment one gets from actually walking through an unknown cityscape, standing atop a mountain you’ve just climbed, or learning to communicate with a local whose language you do not understand. There is value in sweat and effort.

Susan Orlean pointed this out in a story about the remains of Petra, the cave-like capital of 4^th century Nabateans, being made into a virtual reality model. Wrote Susan: “Technology makes it easier to see the world almost as it is, but sometimes the hardest parts are what make travel memorable.”

As I read Susan’s words in The Best Women’s Travel Writing: Volume 12, I thought about my recent bird-watching walk around a small lake here in Tucson. It was a flat trail, just a half-mile in length, and I had to use my rollator as a steading hand and a place to sit every once in a while, but the feeling of accomplishment I felt at the end was significant – so much better than watching bird cams, which is also something I do regularly.

One is not like the other.

Which is why, because I can’t physically do all the things I want to do, or financially afford to travel to all the places I still want to see, I’m thankful for modern-age technology. If nothing else, the years have taught me to be flexible. It’s one of the ways I can continue to experience life zestfully, if not gracefully.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.

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Travel Books: Inspiration and Memory

Posted in aging, Books, Journeys, Travel, Writing, tagged Freya Stark, Nellie Bly, Tioga Pass, travel books, travel writers on November 1, 2023| 2 Comments »

***Tioga Pass view from top of Tioga Peak***

Aging My Way

I’ve been reading books in the travel genre since I’ve been a kid, and have oft quoted Dr. Seuss saying “Oh! The places you’ll go and the things you’ll see!” – And I did, from exploring the neighborhood on my bike as a kid to watching wild elephants and hippos on an African safari.

The first travel book I read was I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson, published in 1940, just a year after I was born. I was 10 years old at the time, and having escaped the children’s side of the library had migrated to the dangerous adult side, where the lions Osa and her husband were filming resided.

By the time I hit my 50s, any list of the Best Travel Books I came across found me having read most of them. And the ones I hadn’t read, well they went on my to-read list. And what I read made my bucket list get longer and longer.

I’ve pretty much read everything written by Jan Morris, Bill Bryson (whose A Walk in the Woods inspired by own years of hiking), Paul Theroux, Robert Louis Stevenson, Peter Matthiessen, William Least Heat Moon (His Blue Highways inspired my own travels in a small RV around North America for nine years) John Steinbeck (whose Travels with Charley inspired the title of my own travel book Travels with Maggie), and my all-time favorite adventurer Tim Cahill.

And then there are these three travel writers who were writing travel books long before I was born, and during a time when respectful women didn’t travel alone, as they so successfully did.

My own favorite, perhaps because we share a journalistic background, is Nellie Bly who in 1888 went around the world in 72 days – and wrote about it 15 years after Jule Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days was published.

Then there is Isabella Bird, who wrote A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains that was published in 1879. It was her fourth, but my favorite of her books. I found it at a national parks’ visitor center, which is an ideal location to find obscure travel books.

And finally, for this blog but not for the list of great women travel writers, there is Freya Stark, who wrote more than two dozen books about her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Of her impressive writings, Valley of the Assassins, published in 1834 is my favorite.

While at 84, my traveling days are mostly over, I’m still reading travel books. The current one is Vagabonding in the USA by Ed Buryn.

It was first published in 1980, so is not too useful as an actual travel guide. But it is, I’m discovering, chockfull of advice that transcends travel. And, like many travel books for me these days, a catalyst for bringing back awesome memories of places I have already visited.

The passage below, for example, let me relive the delight I had in my own cresting of Tioga Pass, where I got out of the car, stretched, felt the breeze blowing my hair about, took in the magnificent view and simply felt glad to be alive.

Wrote Buryn: “I am … driving down from Tioga Pass where California 120 tops the Sierra Nevada and heads east. It is dusk. In the clear mountain/desert air, the alpenglow to the east over Nevada seems almost phosphorescent. Mono Lake shimmers in the darkening distance, with barren ranges endlessly beyond it. … It is the first sundown of another road adventure…”

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Tears, Cows, Dogs and Laughter

Posted in aging, Books, Dogs, Journeys, Travels With Maggie, Uncategorized, Writing, tagged Cows, Tears on June 15, 2023| 5 Comments »

***From my journals: The day I brought Maggie home. She accompanied me in my RV travels for eight years, and was the inspiration for the title of my book, Travels with Maggie***. ***She experienced my laughter more than my tears.***

Aging My Way

A character in a book I was reading said that if you ever needed a good cry, do it around a cow, because dogs notice and come around with licks and kisses to cheer you up.

Thinking about the five dogs that have been my companions over the past eight decades, I couldn’t help but agree with the comment. The dogs, in their turn, each knew when a soft nuzzle was needed. And their warm bodies cuddled up next to mine always comforted me.

So, despite agreeing with the fictional character, whose name I can’t recall right now, I think I’ll stick to dogs when I cry. That even makes sense since there are no cows nearby.

Tears have long been a part of my life. I cried a lot as a child, my favorite place being inside a hedge with a small black mutt, whom I had uncreatively named Blackie. I cried because I was not popular, because my family wasn’t the fantasy one portrayed on television. I cried because I thought no one loved me. I cried if I thought someone looked at me wrong.

I was a foolish child usually crying over nothing, but the tears soothed me. In later years, I learned that tears have actually been scientifically proven to be beneficial, that they detoxify the body and restore its balance.

As a young mother and wife, I cried because my own family was not the everyone-lived-happily-ever-after kind. I cried when my children were hurt, and when my marriage dissolved.

Later I would cry because I couldn’t find my perfect soul mate. Those tears were usually shed at midnight when I was curled up beneath a quilt, and often interrupted when my dog, a faithful cocker spaniel named Peaches back then, would wiggle beneath the covers to comfort me.

I don’t think a cow could do that – not to mention I wouldn’t want it to. And neither, I eventually decided, did I want, or need, a soul mate. I was my own soul mate, and I had a good life, and a good dog. This is probably why I rarely cry these days.

Luckily, I laugh a lot. And science has proven that laughter is quite good for the body, too.

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Peels and Books

Posted in aging, Art, Birds, Books, Journeys, Writing, tagged book banning, Jose Andres, Vegetables Unleashed on June 6, 2023| 4 Comments »

***Tucson’s saguaros are now in bloom — and the Gila Woodpeckers love it. — Art by Pat Bean***

Aging My Way

I shared some potato salad I had made with my friend Jean the other day, and she asked: “Why did you peel the potatoes? “Because I don’t like potato peels,” I replied. To which she said, “I do.”

I thought about this yesterday while reading Vegetables Unleashed, a cookbook by Chef Jose Andres who talked about vegetable peels, clearly stating that he always peeled his vegetables, even tomatoes.

“If the skins don’t bother you, you can skip that, but I’m not sure we can be friends,” he wrote. The comment, I suspect, was written as a joke. But then it reminded me of something I had read the week before in a post about books. Yes, I know. My over-active brain is always trying to connect dots.

Anyway, the earlier comment, was “I don’t think I could be friends with anybody who doesn’t read books.”

I thought that was a bit self-absorbed, even though I realized on reading it that my conversations with other book readers were always more fun, especially when discovering that the two of us liked and had read many of the same books.

Andres’ comment, meanwhile, was way over the top. I mean my friendship with Jean, who is also a chef, isn’t the least bit unhinged because one of us likes peels and one of us doesn’t.

Differences are what makes the world go round, or so I’ve been told – and believe. So as long as you don’t make me eat potato peels, or ban me from reading whatever I like… Oops, now my over-active brain is thinking about people who want to ban books.

Now those are people I’m sure I could never be friends with.

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A Writer’s Dream

Posted in aging, Birds, Books, Journeys, Travels With Maggie, tagged Ed Buryn on April 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Aging My Way

“Sooner or later, all vagabonds discover that something strange happens to them en route. They become aware of having wandered into a subtle network of coincidence and serendipity that eludes explanation. On Tiptoe, magic enters.” – Ed Buryn.

After coming across the above quote, I was interested in buying Buryn’s book, Vagabonding in the USA: A Guide to Independent Travel, which was published in 1980. I thought it would be fun to compare what he had seen and written about to my travels across North America in a small RV from 2004-2013 — and what I wrote about it in my book Travels with Maggie, which was published in 2017.

But I only found one copy of Ed’s book available on the internet, and it was a used paperback selling for $85. Dang it! That’s a bit too expensive for a retiree living on a fixed income. I then checked my local library, but also struck out. It didn’t have a copy.

Anyone have a copy of Ed’s book they would like to exchange for a copy of my Travels with Maggie? I know my paperback only sells on Amazon for $5.99, but maybe someday it might be worth more. Who knows? It happened to Ed’s book.

Meanwhile, I find it kinda nice to have such a dream.

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On Being a Writer

Posted in aging, Books, journalism, Journeys, Uncategorized, Writing on February 17, 2023| 1 Comment »

My former newspaper colleague and dear friend Charlie Trentelman has been browsing the archives of The Standard-Examiner, where I worked for over 20 years. He came across these old clippings and emailed me a copy. Ah! … The memories.

Aging My Way

Laurie Lisle, in her memoir Word for Word said perhaps one of the reasons she wanted to be a reporter is because she could ask anyone about almost anything.

I remember responding to that question a few times in the same way. Of course, it went much deeper than that, with the most important thing being that I wanted to write, and I wanted to be read.

That’s why I blog. It’s why I wrote Travels with Maggie, why I am the staff writer for Story Circle Networks’ journal, and why, occasionally these days, I still submit articles to a variety of publications.

And if that isn’t enough, I fill a page or two in my personal journal most days.

I write because to not do so would be to not breath. I consider myself blessed to have found this passion in my life when I was 25. It happened about 2 a.m. in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, and for some unknown reason found myself getting up and writing about an incident that had moved me deeply the day before.

The only thing I had ever written before this were high school English assignments, which I didn’t particularly enjoy. But I had been, from the time I first learned the alphabet, a bookworm. I read every opportunity I got, from the words on a cereal box to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In my mind, writers were a breed so far above me that I couldn’t picture being among them.

In fact, it was a dozen or more years after I was supporting myself as a newspaper writer before I finally realized I was actually one of them. And even longer after that before I could actually call myself a writer.

It has now been 58 years since that devious writing bug infected me — and changed the whole trajectory of my life.

I’ve come to love that bug with all my heart. And I’m still writing and hope to be right up until the day I die.

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The Quandary of Life and Work

Posted in aging, Art, Birds, Books, Journeys, tagged Life changes, Work on January 9, 2023| 4 Comments »

Saw-Whet Owl — The silver lining of aging is that I have more time to observe birds and paint them. — Art by Pat Bean

As An Old Broad Sees It

I married young, had five children, then joined the work force a month before I turned 28. I was lucky. I fell into a job that I loved so much that I overlooked how hard I struggled to make it all come together as a working mom. I actually believed I could have it all. That makes me laugh now. Today’s women are wiser.

I joined the work force in 1967, long before the much-needed Me-Too Revolution took place. It was also a time in history when women, in large numbers, were finally speaking up for equal opportunities and equal rights and pay as men.

We women have come a long way since then. Just one example is that in the 1960s, women accounted for only 3 percent of the nation’s lawyers. Today that number is over 40 percent. Ruth Baden Ginsburg pointed out the growing numbers of female lawyers in her book My Own Words.

But on a more personal level, I see my granddaughters struggle with finding jobs that they enjoy, but also jobs that let them have a life outside of work. And they are not alone. Just this morning I came across two articles, one in the N.Y. Times, and one that just popped up because I was reading the Times piece. (Sometimes I think the computer gods know more about what I should want than I do.)

Wrote Roxane Gay in the Times article: “… People want something different, something more. They want more satisfaction or more money or more respect. They want to feel as if they’re making a difference. They want to feel valued or seen or heard. They want the man in the next cubicle to chew less loudly so they are afforded more peace … They want to have more time for themselves and interests beyond how they spend their professional lives. They want and want and want and worry that they will never receive the satisfaction they seek.

I’ve heard the same thoughts from my granddaughters.

These are thoughts this old broad, raised by parents who lived through the Great Depression, is only now beginning to hear. During my parents’ era, the main concern was simply for the man of the family to have a job, hopefully one that the family could survive on, never mind if he liked the job or not.

I remember hearing my father say, when my mother finally went to work after the children were all gone, “her salary only pays for what the IRS now charges me in taxes.” This wasn’t true but it salvaged his pride that his wife was working. She, actually, was a better provider than he had ever been.

Now retired, I have time to reflect on all the advances we women, and men, have made over the years. l think having a life outside of work is a worthy idea, especially, since as a journalist of my era, I met hundreds of people who hated their jobs but didn’t have the advantage of quitting, or so they thought.

If I hadn’t fallen into a job I loved, and which gave me all the satisfaction I needed, I could have been one of them.

Now, I’m just an old broad enjoying her retirement, and having time to look at the world a bit differently. I find this quandary of life and its many changes fascinating – but glad I’m not in the middle of the quandary. Being an old broad does have its silver linings.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.

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When Ideas Collide

Posted in aging, Art, Books, journalism, Journeys, tagged Antonin Scalia., Ruth Bader Ginsburg on January 3, 2023| 6 Comments »

***Sunflowers in a fish bowl? Now that’s a debateable idea.*** — art by Pat Bean

Aging My Way

I’m reading My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom I’ve admired ever since hearing her answer to the question: How many women do you think should be on the Supreme Court? “Nine” was her reply, noting that nobody thought anything was wrong about having nine men on the court.

But although I admire her for that statement and looked at her as one of my feminine role models, I kind of disagree. If nothing else my 83 years on this planet has given me, I’ve learned that women and men think differently.

And in my opinion, as a former journalist, that’s not a bad thing. It provides a greater scope of possibilities for coming up with the best solutions to problems or situations. Or as the saying goes: “Two heads are better than one.”

My personal fight over the years has simply been one to have the same opportunities, and the same pay for the same work as men. And the opposite, as well.

And that brings me to Ruth’s tribute to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was often on the opposite side of an issue than Ruth. Even so, the two were best friends.

Wrote Ruth about this dichotomy: “I attack ideas, I don’t attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can’t separate the two, you gotta get another day job.”

These words console me in my own life, because like so many other people these days, I have friends and loved ones on the opposite sides of the political polarization that has Americans at odds these days.

I think it couldn’t help but be a more pleasant world if more people thought like Ruth – and attacked ideas instead of people.

What do you think?

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.

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The Magic of Written Words

Posted in aging, Art, Books, Journeys, Writing, tagged Quotes on December 3, 2022| 2 Comments »

***Written words meaningful to me often find their way even into my sketchbook. — Art by Pat Bean***

Aging My Way

In the 1980s, I became a big fan of Dorothy Gilman’s books and many of the words spoken by her unlikely heroine Mrs. Pollifax, ended up in my journals. Her telling someone that we can’t live our lives the way we set a table especially spoke to me, because that was exactly how I was trying to live my life at that time.

While knives and forks may be arranged in perfect order, I was learning that it would be a cold day in hell before my life would work like that. Mrs. Pollifax helped me accept this, and was also a rung for me to hang on to as I passed through a messy season full of challenges, love, heartbreak, and almost too many changes to count.

While my life is more peaceful and calm these days, I still treasure the written word. Perhaps it is because I, too, am a writer. Whatever, I just know I’m thankful for the inspiration and enlightenment printed words have given me.

It seems as if for every emotion, every passage (Gail Sheehy’s Passages. 1976) I pass through, some writer had the same thoughts, the same emotions. Their words let me know I’m not alone. Which is why my journals are full of quotes that were meaningful to me.

The first quote I remember striking my fancy happened in high school when the class was studying Shakespeare. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Those words mean even more to me today than when I first wrote them down.

I’ve learned that certain writers touch my inner thoughts time and time again. Dorothy Gilman, John MacDonald, Robert Frost, Louise Penny, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg, Gloria Steinem, Mercedes Lackey, Edward Abby, John Irving, Rod McKuen, Jan Morris, even Hunter Thompson in my crazy moments. And so many, many more.

Once, during a period of insecurity, I came upon the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay that cheered me onward. “Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand. Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand,” she wrote. I didn’t read these words in a book by Millay, but rather in a biography of Margaret Mead, who had also found meaning in the quote.

Meanwhile, the words of Rod McKuen were, and still are, one of my favorite quotes. “Nobody’s perfect, and that’s one of the best things that can be said about man.”

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