Home for the holidays and returning home for the holidays are not the same thing. This year, we are not staying home for Christmas. Instead, we are returning home to where we grew up in Illinois to see family and friends. The DRIVE in winter can be a challenge, but we have done it so many times over the nearly 40 years we he have lived in Virginia, that our car is on autopilot.
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Cath and I have been watching two or three episodes of the old TV show “Cheers” each evening. Cathy recalled it was the same way we watched it in the late ‘80s. We were stationed in Germany and our friend Howard was a lifeline to America. He sent us VHS tapes every couple of months with recorded TV shows and movies. We were binge watching before they invented the term.
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Cath and I are among the diminishing number of people who send out Christmas/Holiday cards. In our busy digital world, fewer people send them, and among the younger generations, it is almost nonexistent. That is just life today. Me? I still enjoy the annual “old fashioned” event of exchanging Holiday cards.
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I know it’s hokey, and I know it’s not fine wine, and yet, I could not resist buying a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau at a local wine shop a year ago in November of ‘24. In the ‘80s when stationed in Germany, the annual November release of Beaujolais Nouveau was something we looked for, and looked forward to.
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My friend, Jennifer, and her husband have three children. She is a hair stylist and has her own shop. You can imagine her shock and horror when she received a work text saying, “… I hope you don’t recover from that surgery and it fucking kills you you fat fucking gay white bitch.”
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OK. Cath and I did a thing. We are in California and bought a camper van. It has been a lifelong dream, and we just pulled the trigger. Over the next couple of weeks, we will drive it 3,000 miles back to Virginia, hopefully the first of many adventures with it.
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Fifty-six years ago, from August 15-18, 1969, a three day festival celebrating Peace and Music took place at Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York. My friend Chuck, all of 19 at the time, drove there with three buddies, and experienced sex, drugs, and great Rock & Roll music at what came to be known as Woodstock.
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We West Point Whiskey Warriors gave it our best shot on the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky. By the numbers, there were fourteen of us ‘78ers, along with eight wives, from twelve states. We sampled at nine distilleries in four days, and had one helluva good time. Numbers of course don’t capture everything, or for that matter, much of anything.
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This write-up is from my friend, Clark Hall (no relation), a Vietnam Veteran. While the words are his, the lessons are for all of us —
60 years ago, on August 3, 1965, an “incident of war” occurred that foreshadowed the human, political and military disaster underscoring the lunacy of the Vietnam War.
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Although the sky was robin egg blue, it was more a Miles Davis “Kind of Blue” day. It was too beautiful to be driving to a hospital, but that was my destination. It was a Sunday morning, with lite Sunday morning traffic. I was making my way from the Northern Neck to the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia
Continue reading “The Drive (Sunday Morning Coming Down)”
Live Life Exuberantly 