Pat Bean's blog

The Time of Your Life

January 31, 2014 by Pat Bean

    “You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by” — James Matthew Barrie

Tucson has escaped the ugly cold and flowers can still be seen in front of my apartment complex. I thought I would share with my more northern friends. — Photo by Pat Bean.

The Last Day of January

If you haven’t broken all your New Year’s resolutions by now, I want to know your secret.

And of course cactus blooms as Tucson is located in the desert. — Photo by Pat Bean

As January’s freakishly cold weather for most of the country slips past into February’s what will the days ahead be like, I ponder on my past month’s accomplishments, which of course includes already breaking most of my New Year’s resolutions.

Thankfully, however, I’ve finally learned that acknowledging what I did get done is more rewarding and encouraging than beating myself up for all the things I didn’t do.

That actually was a 2013 resolution that became easier to do as the days slipped by. I don’t know about you, but I can’t live every day as I’ve planned it in my daybook.

For example, on today’s list I have four writing projects that need to be done,  house chores, a trip to the library, art projects that include making two  cards for upcoming family birthdays, and half a dozen more trivial things.

I know that marking a line through each item when completed will give me great satisfaction. But I also know the wisdom of James Barrie’s words.

Finding time to enjoy playing and walking with my canine companion, and smelling the flowers along the way, and leaving time to watch the hummingbirds at my feeder, or simply letting my frantic brain think about nothing for a while, is just as important as what is actually on my to-do list.

I hope you do, too. Have a great last day of January.

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat: Craves Adventure http://tinyurl.com/khs4jkx Words to live by.

Posted in Adventures With Pepper, Journeys | Tagged James Barrie, new year's resolutions, pat bean, time | 5 Comments »

I Love a Good Mystery

January 30, 2014 by Pat Bean

  “Without mysteries, life would be dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?”  — Charles de Lint

Can you identify this bird? Or will it remain a mystery?

Which Is Why I Enjoy Bird Watching

“My detective story begins brightly, with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez. Now why did she wear a pince-nez in her bath? If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands upon the murderer, but he’s a very cool and cunning fellow…” – wrote Dorothy Sayers as she plotted her first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery in the early 1920s.

Cover of Are Women Human?, which contains two of Sayers’ feminist essays. — Wikimedia

When the book, “Whose Body” came out in 1923, the naked victim was male, but the pince-nez clue was still there. Many Lord Peter Wimsey books followed. I think I’ve read them all.

Along with writing the Wimsey mysteries, which like Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple books, continue to be popular today, Sayers was a poet, playwright and advertising writer.

One of the latter efforts included a toucan jingle for Guinness Beer: “If he can say as you can. Guinness is good for you. How grand to be a Toucan. Just think what Toucan do?”

This same kind of humor continues in the Wimsey mysteries, which is consistent with the character’s name-play on the word whimsy.

DVDs of some of the Lord Wimsey films I checked out of the library get the credit for this blog idea.

The joy of reading Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries for me is that it is all about figuring out whodunit before the killer is revealed.

It’s sort of the same with bird watching. You have to read all the clues – profile, coloring, beak size, and a jillion other field marks – if you want to make an identification before the bird flies away.

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat: She’s a Maineaic  http://tinyurl.com/psgwdqx Einstein said what about anger?

Posted in Art, Books, Journeys, Writing | Tagged bird watching, Dorthy Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey, mystery books, writers | 8 Comments »

“Writing Down the River”

January 29, 2014 by Pat Bean

”  Hunter S. Thompson

The first time I rafted down the Grand Canyon, the Little Colorado River entrance to the mightier Colorado River was red and thick with mud from recent upstream rains. The second time it was crystal clean, and we floated in its current. I’m the middle blonde, and I was 60 when the photograph was taken.

A fantastic read.

 

Bookish Wednesday

A fairy tale begins with “Once upon a time.” And a river story with “No shit! There I was,” said outspoken journalist Linda Ellerbee in her essay about rafting down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

And there she was — on an adventure one summer taken by 14 other fantastic female writers. The 15 women ranged in age, and in lifestyles that went from city women who had never peed outdoors to athletic women who considered nature their true homes. They each wrote about the Grand Canyon from their own perspective, and about how the fickle river and the high rock walls affected and changed them.

Being a female writer who has been on this same adventure twice in my life – the last time as a birthday present to myself when I turned 60 – my soul triumphed with joy when I came across their book, “Writing Down the River (1998, Northland Publishing, photographed and produced by Kathleen Jo Ryan) in the public library.

Of course I checked it out. Reading the book these past few days has brought back many memories of 32 days, 16 for each trip, that rank high on my list of the best days of my life.

Among my own writings about my Grand Canyon trip was a bird column about the canyon wren, which often serenaded us during our early mornings on the river.

The first time I went down the river, I paddled myself almost the entire 225 miles in a small raft. I came away from the experience a whole person, accepting both my strengths and my weaknesses.

The second time I let the boatman (she was female but she was still called a boatman) oar me down the river, an admission that time had come for me to slow down a bit and take more time to smell the flowers and watch the birds – but also that my adventuring days were still far from over.

I highly recommend this trip for all women who are at turning points in their lives – and if you can’t go, at least read the book. The words and photographs can’t help but touch your heart and make you stronger.  

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

  Bean/s Pat: Where Have All the Flowers Gone  http://tinyurl.com/l89g62e In honor of Pete Seeger and my generation of flower-child music.

Posted in Art, Birds, Books, Favorite Places, Journeys, Nature, Writing | Tagged " female writers, "Writing Down tthe River, grand canyon | Leave a Comment »

Thought and Memory

January 28, 2014 by Pat Bean

          “The ancestor of every action is a thought.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

          “It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.” – Barbara Kingsolver

A raven in Yosemite. — Photo by Pat Bean

Huginn and Muginn  

According to  legend, Odin, the Norse God of  Asgard, had two ravens. One was  named Huginn, meaning thought, and the other Muginn, meaning memory.

One of my roof-top ravens on an earlier day. — Photo by Pat Bean

I thought about these two mythical birds this morning as I watched, from my bedroom balcony, a pair of ravens skittering about on the red tile roof of an adjacent building. I see these, or other, ravens often. Sometimes I’m amazed at how the sheen of their midnight black feathers appear almost white when the sun strikes them in a peculiar way.

There were no ravens in Texas, where I grew up. I only became familiar with these members of the corvid family when I moved West. And then when I became a passionate birder, I spent hours learning to tell them apart from their cousins, the crows.

Huginn and Muninn sit on Odin’s shoulders in an illustration from an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript.

It’s an easy task if you see the two species together. The raven is quite a bit larger with a thick sturdy beak. But when they’re at a distance and flying overhead, it’s not so easy, well at least until you realize the raven has a wedge-shaped tail and the outer edge of the crow’s tail is straight.

Smiling to myself, and perhaps thinking like Dr. Seuss, I wondered which of my two roof-hopping ravens was Huginn, and which was Muginn. Then I laughed at my thoughts, while memories of watching ravens in other places and other times danced through my head.

Thoughts and memories – that’s really all we are.

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat:  Birding Southern Baja  http://tinyurl.com/kgud9e6  A bit of armchair birding and travel gleamed from this delightful blog.

Posted in Birds, Journeys | Tagged Huginn and Muginn, Odin, ravens, thought and memory | 2 Comments »

The Meaning of Vertiginous

January 27, 2014 by Pat Bean

            “I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” – Dr. Seuss

I’m always chasing butterflies. — Photo by Pat Bean

And Leftovers Soup

“Look up vertiginous” was a note I wrote to myself when I came across the word a while back while reading.  I just came across the note again this morning — while looking through my daybook in hopes that a blogging topic would pop into my mind.

They cheer up any day. — Photos by Pat Bean

I’m normally never at a loss for words, but an ear problem this past week has blurred my thoughts. When I looked the word up, I decided it was as good an excuse as any for my lazy blogging week. Vertiginous means something that makes you dizzy or gives you vertigo, which my ear pain sort of did to me.

I forgot in what context the word was used in my reading, but laughed at the sentence the dictionary used to explain its meaning: “my small mind contained in earthly human limits, not lost in vertiginous space and elements unknown”  — Diana Cooper. Just such a sentence is probably what made me write the note to myself in the first place.

Back almost to normal, re my ear infection, I decided  this morning to clean out the refrigerator and make leftover soup.

The soup ingredients included a cup of chicken stock,  about a cup of leftover bloody mary mix (sans the alcohol), one small diced turnip, one/fourth head of a small cabbage, one/fourth of an onion diced small,  a handful of chopped carrots, one/fourth pound beef sausage sliced thin, a stalk of celery and salt to taste.

I cooked the mixture in my small slow cooker until the cabbage was soft and the other veggies still a bit crispy. I think it’s yummy, not vertiginous at all

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat: Butterflies in a Winter Wood http://tinyurl.com/ljjxw6b Just a few more butterflies to cheer your day.

Posted in Journeys | Tagged butterflies, Dr. Seuss, recipes, soup, Vertiginous | 2 Comments »

Paper Fetish

January 17, 2014 by Pat Bean

Yesterday’s use of paper included adding a kestrel painting to my sketchbook, writing down dates to remember in my diary calendar, which is full of paintings and quotes, and writing in my to-do journal, which includes a hodgepodge of notes and ideas to myself. — Photo by Pat Bean

            “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with meaning.” – Maya Angelou

I’m So Sorry My Beloved Trees

            I love paper, crisp new pages in a book, cold pressed and textured artist sheets, fanciful stationary, designer pages for my scrapbooking and even the thick block of white for my printer.

But I especially love the blank pages that fill new journals, even more so when their artistic creators have filled bits and pieces of the pages with fairies, flowers, dragons or animal images, and even more when they have left words behind to tickle my little gray cells.

Like these words, which I came across yesterday:  “Let’s talk about mountains. You start climbing one, you toil, you sweat, you finally reach the top, and what do you get? Well, along with a sense of accomplishment, of peace, of a job well done, along with the satisfaction of doing what you set out to do … you get a great view of the next mountain. Looming, Challenging, Calling your name.”  These words were left me behind to ponder from the journal creators, Mark Sanders and Tia Sillers —  And ponder I did.

I wonder if the spirits of trees, like this beauty in Brazos Bend State Park in Texas, are infused into the paper I touch and use daily.

These days, I usually have several journals going at once, the most used being a daily journal in which I write to-do lists (Things I want to keep from this journal get rewritten into my computer journal, which I began several years ago to preserve my writing fingers from cramping),  and  a  journal that I keep beside me when I read, and use to write down quotes and a mishmash of thoughts and ideas.

Even though I love computer journaling, which these days includes this blog, I can’t imagine a day without putting my hands on real paper. It’s an oxymoron for me, because I also love trees. Sometimes I wonder about the origin of the paper I write on, and almost feel the trees talking to me. I hope they forgive me.

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat: The Blood-Red Pencil http://tinyurl.com/lm2k2pg This is for all the writers who have procrastinated until the deadline monster is close enough to bite off our noses.

Posted in Art, Birds, Books, Journeys, Writing | Tagged Brazos Bend State Park, journaling, paper, pat bean, trees | 6 Comments »

It’s a Bird – Or Maybe Not

January 15, 2014 by Pat Bean

“Yes sir, I am a tortured man for all seasons, as they say, and I have powerful friends in high places. Birds sing where I walk, and children smile when they see me coming.” – Hunter S. Thompson

Metal bird sculpture at Tohono Chul Park in Tucson. — Photo by Pat Bean

Fooled by the Eyes

            Searching for birds has its surprises. Sometimes what you think is a yellow-rumped warbler turns out just to be the profile of a

I like it that this bird was created from junked metal parts. — Photo by Pat Bean

quirky tree twig lit by a spit of sunlight, or a snowy egret turns out to be a white trash bag that someone carelessly tossed away, and which was blown up against some weeds by the wind.

I’ve seen leaf birds, shadow birds, bottle birds (a blue one floating on the water that from a far distance looked like a blue heron), stump birds and thousands of litter birds of flotsam,  jetsam and abandoned debris.

I thought about these non-birds during a recent stroll in Tucson’s Tohono Chul Park. Unlike all the litter birds I’ve seen, the park]s birds made me smile.

Are you smiling, too.

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat: The Currents of Life http://tinyurl.com/kenqp2u Just some things to ponder.

 

Posted in Birds, Favorite Places, Journeys, Nature | Tagged Birds, Hunter S. Thompson, litter, non-birds, pat bean, Tonono Chul Park, tucson | 2 Comments »

Good-Bye Gypsy Lee

January 14, 2014 by Pat Bean

“Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.” – Gilda Radner

Me, Pepper and Cayenne. — Photo by T.C. Ornelas

Hello Cayenne

            Ten years ago I sold my home and traded in my car for a new RV, which I named Gypsy Lee, in honor of my wanderlust and a grandfather I never knew but from whom my mother claimed I inherited my rootless ways.

Me and Gypsy Lee in 2004, 140,000 miles ago.

I lived on the road for nine years before settling in a Tucson apartment a year ago, during which time Gypsy Lee, a 21-foot motor home continued to be my only means of transportation.

This past weekend, I parked Gypsy Lee at my daughter’s house and drove away in a bright, red new car that I named Cayenne. I thought it was a fitting name to go with my canine companion, Pepper, and this flower child who still loves to wear tie-dye.

Over the past few months, I came to understand that driving an RV in a crowded city was holding me back from doing things, like attending a play where there was no parking or driving on city streets at night. There was also Gypsy’s gas guzzling stomach to consider, which meant I mostly only drove her for errands once a week because of the cost of keeping her fed.

My beloved Maggie, who spent the first eight years with me in Gypsy Lee. She is still missed

I knew I was going to eventually have to give her up, but sensibly had decided to keep her one more year for financial reasons.

Then it finally dawned on me that while I’m, thankfully, healthy and physically active now, I’m going to be 75 this year. Now is not the time for me to slow down. I need to keep running as fast as I can, as far as I can, and as hard as I can for as long as I can.

So on Saturday it was good-bye Gypsy Lee. We had an awesome 10 years together. I will always treasure the memories we made during our 140,000 miles on the road.

And hello, Cayenne. You’ve got a lot to live up to in sharing your life with me and Pepper.

Oh, and the first place I visited yesterday, after waiting a year to do so, was Tucson’s downtown main library, where Gypsy Lee couldn’t go because there was no parking space for her.

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat: You gotta do what you gotta do to survive http://tinyurl.com/k8tor9v This is a story that made me feel blessed for everything I have – and for the power of starting over, which I once had to do in life. Although my situation wasn’t as drastic as this story, I did have to borrow money to pay rent for a while.

Posted in Adventures With Pepper, Journeys, Travel | Tagged changes, new car, pat bean, Travel | 27 Comments »

Mount Lemmon and Spaldeens

January 11, 2014 by Pat Bean

            “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.”  — Clay P. Bedford

Mount Lemmon from the Catalina Foothills. — Wikimedia photo

I Don’t Believe Curiosity Will Kill Me

          

Sara Plummer Lemmon — Wikimedia photo

  Did you know that Mount Lemmon, the awesome 9,157-foot-tall mountain that has been my backyard landscape here in Tucson for the past year, is named after a woman?

I didn’t until this past week when I came across a plague on the Geology Wall at Tohono Chul Park.

After I got home, I did a bit of research on the mountain’s namesake, Sara Plummer Lemmon (1836-1923), and discovered that she was a botanist with several plants named in her honor.

Mount Lemmon was named for her because she was the first white woman to climb to its top, and along the way she discovered several plant varieties unique to the mountain.

While it’s actually spelled a Spalding, it is called a Spaldeen because that’s how it is pronounced in the Bronx. Wikimedia photo

Do you know what a Spaldeen is? I didn’t until I came across the term in Annie Rachele Lanzillotto’s book, “L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir,” which I’m currently reading. Great book, by the way.

A Spaldeen, I learned, is a pink rubber ball commonly used to play stickball in the Bronx.  How did I live to my age and not know that, I wondered?

Both these discoveries fulfilled my goal of learning something new each and every day. In my book, a day without learning something new lacks soul.

As Eartha Kitt once said, “I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.”

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat: The White Goose  http://tinyurl.com/ny5obkx Standing out in a crowd

Posted in Journeys, Nature, Quote for the Day | Tagged education, Mount Lemmon, pat bean, Sara Plummer Lemmon, Spaldeens | 3 Comments »

Quote for the Day

January 10, 2014 by Pat Bean

            “No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.” – Regina Brett

One of the best things about taking Pepper for an early morning walk is getting to see the sun come up over the desert — while the moon is still in the sky. — Photo by Pat Bean

That’s My Life

What Regina said is what I have to do, despite the fact I’ve been fighting a sinus infection. I’ve gotten up, dressed up (OK, so it was just a sweater over my pajamas at 6 a.m.) and walked my dog, Pepper, four times a day.  And I live in a third-floor walk-up.

But don’t get me wrong.  I’m actually thankful, because the task of doing this over the past year has gotten me in better shape than I was a year ago. That’s great news for someone who is pushing 75.

Every old-broad should have a dog to walk.

Bean’s Pat: Interesting Literature:  http://tinyurl.com/oqw3gsj More quotes. I like No. 9 best.

Posted in Adventures With Pepper, Dogs, Journeys, Nature | Tagged dogs, old broads, pat bean | 6 Comments »

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  “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

  Pat Bean is a writer, avid birder, hiker and passionate nature observer with wanderlust in her soul. She spent nine years living and traveling in a small RV. She now lives in Tucson with Scamp, a rescue who was supposed to be a Schnauzer mix but turned out to be a Siberian Husky-Shih Tzu mix who is as stubborn as his owner, her granddaughter says. She was also a journalist for 37 years, and can be reached at patbean@msn.com

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