Notes From A Bear's Journey

     St. Malo basically has no "t" when you pronounce it so the sound you hear is seh'-Malo, which was the first stop of our visit.  Home to François-René de Chateaubriand,* he not of the cut of steak people so love, but rather a strong defender of the Catholic faith.  As reprinted in the Paris Review , he wrote:  In a society that is dissolving and recomposing itself, the struggle of two spirits, the clash of past and future, the intermingling of old ways and new, makes for a transitory concoction that leaves no time for boredom.  Passions and characters set at liberty are displayed with an energy unimaginable in a well-regulated city.  The breaches of the law, the freedom from duties, customs, and good manners, even the dangers intensify the appeal of this disorder.  The human race on holiday strolls down the street, rid of its masters and restored for a moment to its natural state; it feels no need of a civic bridle until it shoulders the ...

                                        Map:  InfoPlease.com       Think of a "river" of chalk, one nearly as wide as a small city and one which starts halfway up the eastern coast of England, heads inland near London them splits east to become the white cliffs of Dover before exiting south of Southampton.  Said the article in  National Geographic :  Chalk is a pure type of limestone composed of tiny shells of marine organisms.  Deposits are found worldwide, but in England the geological ripples from the rising of the Alps 40 million years ago brought a wide swath of it to the surface.  It's porous and fractured, with up to 40 percent of its bulk made up of spaces between the rock grains.  Rain that falls on chalk sinks into the ground, sometimes taking months to percolate through the hills...Rainstorms produce no floods, and in drought th...

     Originally, this was based on a game I used to play, asking players to name three famous people with a certain name; so for George one might say George Clooney, George Harrison, and George of the Jungle.  Okay, that last one was a reach but you get the idea.  This was in the days when celebrities and sports figures were few and stood out: Joe Demaggio and Yogi Berra, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como.  So naming three Mickeys or three Perrys was a small but doable challenge (I used to make the game that of naming 4, which was a bit more challenging).  But even today, naming three older names --Rita, Greta, Pearl, Alan, etc.-- gives you an idea of our changing times as once-common names have diminished, just as the Brittanys and Zacharys will for future generations.   And it was with this thought that I told my wife that she and I were entering a period where the next ten years would likely have us witnessing even more changes both physically ...

       My wife and I had just finished watching (again) Sweet Home Alabama with Reece Witherspoon; if you haven't seen it, the movie from the early 2000s still holds up as an old-fashioned yarn, a glance back at small towns and the good ol' days of family values and long-held traditions (and unfortunately, prejudices).  So it was ironic that as I finished walking my dog, my own town's parade was getting ready: streets were blocked, police cars were redirecting traffic, bands and song girls were practicing their marching routines, and people who had set chairs aside from the night before were already arriving with their children and lining them up.  I couldn't help but think back to the last time I even saw a parade.  And certainly there are the big ones --the Pasadena Rose Parade and the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade with "floats" going down Manhattan.  But a small town parade these days seems rare.  It takes a lot to put on a parade, from deco...