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| Packing - September 9, 2011 |
I guess I am well and truly
"Outta Alaska" for the next 8 or 9 months. The photo on my blog homepage (above) was taken a few years ago and is a view I took in every time I drove back to the cabin on Diamond Ridge. However, great views are common in Homer, a town that is set like a jewel in the heart of Kachemak Country. In my last post I talked about my old high school friends from the village of Sloan, a home town I left to move to Rochester in 1963 when I got my first job with Xerox. I only lived in Sloan for about 8 years yet I have a strong sense of home connected with it and the little house my mom continued to live in for 48 years after I left. There were Christmases and Thanksgivings, summer weekends, my three kids visiting their grandparents as they grew up. But Homer is by far the place I've stayed longest -- 28 years and counting. It's been a wonderful place to be. I've never felt a need to lock my door in Homer and never have. It is as safe a place as I've ever been. It's beautiful too. I have an album on Facebook that contains some Homer photos I'm fond of -- take a look if you like. Here is yet another shot of the very photogenic Homer Spit taken one fine day a couple of weeks ago.
I guess all that verbiage is really just one way of saying I'm not ready to pull up stakes yet. I don't know exactly when I'll be back but I will be back. I'm missing my friends already. My tennis buddies, my partners at Alaska Boats & Permits, the countless people I chat with in the supermarket and at the post office, my oldest and dearest friends all around town.
I'm in Eugene today and for the next week visiting my son Tuli and his family. As you know if you've been reading this blog I love spending time with my youngest grandson, Harper. Here he is on our walk to the park yesterday.
He's learned to talk pretty well by now. The change in his ability to communicate since I last saw him this spring is amazing. In the book I just finished, The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker tells us that at Harper's age of 2 1/2 years, children's brains are so plastic, so absorptive, that their vocabulary is expanding geometrically; some kids learn up to 20 words each day. What that says about my own ability to learn Thai at the ripe old age of 68 is open to interpretation but it isn't exactly encouraging.
Those Thai studies are more or less on hold until I get to Bangkok next week. I'll start them again once I'm settled in. I've done a bit of research to locate tennis clubs in Bangkok and have some emails going with potential coaches. I have to get my teeth fixed and want to buy a motorcycle. And I'll soon be hanging out with Nut again after going a very long time without her cheerful presence, her playful scolding to be careful with my toast crumbs, her petite sexiness. I can hardly wait.
