Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Our destination was just ahead, a week-long stay with friends from long ago (as in 50 years past); we would be shown a side of Seattle I wasn't aware of, partially because it had been so long since I last lived there but also because our friends lived in a part of Seattle far distant from town on the northwest side and one a bit closer to the rather-large University of Washington.  We would be treated to bike rides in the day and eclectic jazz jams late at night (in a Canadian hockey bar, no less), eating at famous and not-so-known places with equal gusto, and venturing onto just one of many ferries that crisscross the many islands dotting the waters of Puget Sound; we would see both sunny (but chilly) days and a downpour that lasted days (a welcome sight for the area which had only gotten a quarter inch of rain in the past three months); and we would see everything from a massive troll carved under a freeway (rather famous, it turns out) to a huge bronze statue of Lenin rescu

    The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks, wrote Oliver Burkeman , and we had now used up one of those weeks.  Our rental car was still purring and we were growing used to the relaxed pace, the grand meals of clam chowder with smoked salmon and the baskets of fish and calamari that arrived in front of us for lunch.  Their freshness was accompanied by the diverse history and character of the places we were visiting.  At the Drift In, Lester Blair was an amateur boxer who would encourage his customers to "work out their differences" in a boxing ring upstairs, said their storied history on the menus; it was a place that had: ... people from every walk of life.  Hippies, rednecks, suits, rich and poor.  It was rich, tantalizing cob webby, simple, with textures of lives that belied the surroundings.  It  was a place that left no one untouched who dared go in.  It was magical, an amazing dis

     And now in our fourth day of travel and on our way up the coast, we entered Oregon and kept bumping into friendly people.  When I stepped out of my car to get gas, an attendant was right there straight out of Andy of Mayberry.  How much do you want?, he asked.  Uh, you fill up my gas?, I stammered.  He smiled; it's what we do here, he said, then proceeded to clean my windshield.  Wait a minute.  What exactly happened here?  Did I somehow travel back in time to another era? (I would find out later that in Oregon it is unlawful for you to fill up your own gas tank; but hey, it was sure nice to see...and all done with a smile).     On this our fourth night of "winging it" (traveling without making reservations), we were again lucky to score a room facing the ocean; to both hear and see its wild roughness just out of reach, we felt like zookeepers certain that the cages were all locked.  We're mostly water, my wife reminded me, even as I stared at tsunami warning sig

Oysters from Tomales Bay       As we progressed on our trip, skipping many of the areas we had already seen on the coast in order to ready ourselves for the sights ahead --the redwoods, the fog-filled coasts further north, the quaint towns and wineries that looked eager for guests-- we discovered that along with the spectacular scenery, the one thing that we had been missing all along was the people; to a person we found everyone so friendly.  We had witnessed this earlier in the counties we had visited (Sonoma and Marin in northern California, home to oysters and wineries); but with what seemed to be so much burnout in the world --the pandemic, the fires, the crowded freeways, the uncertainty-- we were thrown off guard that such kindness and openness were still so readily waiting.  And now we were further north in the little town of Mendocino...     One such person was Lyla who worked solo at at an upscale breakfast/lunch place, Flow (which stood for F resh, L ocal, O rganic, W holes

    "Time may change me, but I can't trace time," wrote David Bowie.  And I'd be among the first to admit that while going back to a place you loved or grew up in brings joy and a tinge of youthful memories, it also makes you realize that 1) you can't go back; and 2) the world has moved on.  What overrides all of this are your friends and the people you'll meet, causing the rest to blur as if you don't want to know; surely this wasn't the way you remembered things, the buildings so modern and the people around you so young.  The realization that accompanies those thoughts is that you must have somehow gotten older...or at least that's how I viewed it.      I was traveling back to my old haunts in northern California, ready to take a slow drive up the coasts of both California and Oregon with my wife; before long we would journey through the wilds of the redwoods in Humboldt County and move beyond those into the rocky and spectacularly long beaches

     What a fading word that is in today's world...trust.  Even the guy at the copy shop laughed when I told him that I needed to make a copy of my "trust" for the estate attorney we were interviewing.  There was a time was a handshake was as good as a contract and when a promise was just that, a promise.  But somehow it would seem that we've veered away from that, viewing things with an almost-skeptical eye first, then a semi-trustful one down the road.  Think of when someone is nice to you, even on the phone.  It almost shocks you (and impresses you), as if being nice was something unusual.  Decency, integrity, honesty...these days, it almost seems foolish to believe the person who tells you, "trust me."  What happened?      At my age, thinking of wills and trusts should have been completed long ago (sheepishly we only completed everything some ten years ago).  But now we were heading to another estate attorney because, well, things had changed.  The pande