Family Visits…and oddities along the way

The last few weeks have been spent visiting family in St. Louis (mine) and North Carolina (Jessica’s) as well as a few friends. It’s been over a year since we saw any of these folks in person, so it was really lovely to have these reunions. I’m not going to bore you with too many family details (sharing my feelings, especially in writing, isn’t my specialty), but instead I thought I’d share a few of the fun and funny memories from the past few weeks along with a few photos and such…

(83) For-Truth. Probably the most pervasive set of billboards from Utah through to North Carolina was the (83) For-Truth signs. If you haven’t seen these, they’re evangelical signs that all encourage the viewer to call this number, evidently to get some truth. However, I decided it was more fun to consider alternatives for the (83) For-Truth phone number. After we’d read a few dozen of these aloud (“You can talk to God just like Jesus did…83-For-Truth”), I got in the habit of reading random billboards and adding “83-For-Truth” on the end. In the end I decided they might get more callers if they attached their number to adult super store signs (“Lion’s Den Adult Super Store. Next Exit. 83-For-Truth”). Jessica was less convinced.

In St. Louis we had fun with animals. Our cats slowly settled into living there. Meanwhile, we discovered that while one of Quicksand’s favorite activities in California is catching the large, slow moving flies we have occasionally in the Spring and Summer, the flies in St. Louis are definitely too fast for him to grab. We saw about two million rabbits, who were oddly unconcerned by our presence unless we came within a few feet of them. We watched the glorious multitude of birds that my parents’ various feeders attracted and wondered at the incredibly fat squirrels snacking on what the birds dropped. (Not to mention the squirrels with the crazy tail: it went from narrow by it’s butt to incredibly puffy and then the last third of it was narrow again and hanging limply. Sad squirrel.) Probably most interesting among the animal kingdom was learning more about my dad’s entrepreneurial youth collecting fireflies. He shared his story with us which coincidentally aligns nicely with some of Jessica’s writing about the capacities of young people.

Treasures of St. Louis (and more animals). For those of you who haven’t been to St. Louis, I’ll just say it was a wonderful place to grow up. There’s tons of great cultural institutions, many of them free to the public. Among those is the zoo, which we visited with my brother and niece (who is almost–OMG!–sixteen!!!). Sadly, all my favorite big cats were hiding in the shade to avoid the 90-degree heat. We also met our friends Sam and Katie and their kids at the Botanical Garden where we enjoyed observing the million varieties of day lilies, watching the fuzzy turtles, and feeding the super-fat koi. Another highly recommended site in St. Louis is the Laumeier Sculpture Park, with works tucked into the woods and on giant lawns connected by a sprawling network of footpaths. And no visit to St. Louis is complete without a concrete from Ted Drewes (world’s best frozen custard). Seriously, if you ever visit, don’t miss it.

***NOTE: I changed the slideshows into long series of images because I was told that in the slideshow my text covered the images. I will work on having shorter captions in the future.***

Oddities of the Central West End. One afternoon we went to my mom’s friend’s house to use her pool (because St. Louis is beastly hot in the summer). This is in the “Central West End” neighborhood of St. Louis–in the city, but fairly white and wealthy, hip, but aging, nice old architecture. Before hitting the pool, Jessica and I wandered the area for a bit and discovered three things that stuck out. (1) For the price of our 800-square-foot-half-a-duplex in Santa Cruz, we could afford a 3500+-square-foot house in St. Louis. Housing prices make no sense. You probably already knew that. (2) We wandered by the home of the McCloskey’s. Yup, those folks. (For those of you who don’t remember, they’re the gun-toting couple that threatened BLM protestors.) They live a block away from the friend we were visiting who shared some truly awful stories about the way they’ve treated their neighbors, ranging from suing queer couples in the neighborhood to tearing down JCC-run bee hives because the bees came onto their property. St. Louis is such a weird mix, and conservative is definitely a part of it. (3) On top of all the beautiful brick buildings, we were struck by the preservation of this old place…

Goofing off in North Carolina. While visiting with Jessica’s family in Asheville and Raleigh, we’ve spent some time packing for our departure to Italy on Thursday. Other than that, we’ve enjoyed some silliness and relaxation. Among other things, we hiked or took a significant walk nearly every day, celebrated Mark’s 70th birthday by tubing down the French Broad River, played on a high ropes course with our nephews, watched our friends’ 2-year-old son Bodhi mow the lawn, water the plants, and clip bonzai trees, and generally ate well and relaxed. Our two nephews, Connor (5) and Caleb (8), were especially funny. Caleb spent the pandemic year ignoring his online classes and instead becoming “self-educated” by watching Brain Pop videos. This led to discussions with strangers about the suffragettes, and a quiz show where he asked Jay and I about Harvey Milk. Not bad for an 8-year-old! Despite all that knowledge, though, he failed when trying to sing for us, forgetting the lyrics to Old MacDonald, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and Twinkle, Twinkle. Connor was a bit less of an intellectual, but was a great partner in the pool and on the trampoline.

Anyhow, here’s a few of the highlights from North Carolina…

Oh…one quick video. This is Caleb crashing on the zip line at Go Ape. My first three times, I landed cleanly, but of course the only video of me on there was the fourth time, when I succumbed to the tendency of the zip line to turn people backwards. No one else had a clean landing except Emily once. It was fun despite the mess.

Telephone logistics. One of the things we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out for this year is how to deal with our phones. As of today, we’ve switched to a service called Tossable Digits. So, if you call us, it goes straight to voicemail which we’ll get via email. And texts will reach us once we get to somewhere with wifi. It’s super-cheap and lets us keep our phone number, just without a SIM card. Once we get to Italy, we’ll get local SIM cards to be able to use there, but because of Tossable Digits, we’ll still have our US phone numbers receiving texts and voicemails. Seems like it’ll work! (As and aside, if you want to actually talk to us using What’s App or FaceTime will work best, but texts or voicemails are a fine way to reach us if you don’t need an immediate answer…)

Moving on. That’s it for the US of A! On Thursday we’re off to Italy. After a couple of days to recover in Milan, we’ll be off to the Valle d’Aosta (lowest COVID rates in Italy!) for about ten days of hut-to-hut hiking. So, expect a boat load of beautiful photos sometime after that…