Written December 1st, 2015

5:00 AM

It's quite cold. Even sitting right in front of the fire in the Ben Franklin I'm wearing a sweatshirt, a knit cap, and I  have the two "throws" around my legs. The taste of the coffee, and watching the flames, are both lovely; I never tire of either. 

The long-haired Siamese cat is curled up next to the laptop; this is her short time with me before Ziggy wakes up and she retreats to the safety of the tabletop.

Both of the weekend days were quite interesting. Saturday afternoon I went to a "pre-launch book party" in honor of my friend Susan's daughter's book "Sonora" being accepted for publication. Sunday afternoon I went to see Rick Steves speak, with one of the core members of my travel club.

I was quite excited to go to the book party because I've never known anyone personally who had a novel published. Susan (the author's mother) is in the PR business, so part of the reason for the party was to generate interest in the book well before its publishing date. (The editing process is supposed to take a year or so).

 Susan's daughter Hannah, the young author, read the first chapter of the manuscript, and I was very impressed. There were images from her childhood, a haunting imaginary friend, descriptions and dreams, the writing style poetic but with a compelling flow and intensity.

After the reading, everyone said they couldn't wait to read the book, which has been completed but still needs to be edited.

Susan had invited all the important people in her life, so it was interesting to meet them. One woman had been Susan's friend so long that she was with Susan in a New York bar, thirty years ago when she met her husband Sami. Also attending was the woman whose PR firm Susan had worked in before she and Sami started their own company. Another was Hannah's first writing teacher in college, who flew out from Dallas.

Photo of two friends of Susan's, Hannah, Susan, and I:

 I ended up talking quite a bit to the woman on the left in the above photo, and we exchanged contact information. Her daughter had been Hannah's high school friend, and who had ended up volunteering with Susan for the organization Seeds of Peace, which works to bring young people of Judiasm and Islamic faiths to work on projects together.

My friend Susan is particularly interested in that cause because she is Jewish, married to a Palestinian Muslim. (Sami actually spent his childhood in Italy, where the family emigrated to when the part of Palestine his family lived in became Israel.)

Hannah lives in New York City now, and her boyfriend had come to Arizona with her for the party. I told him how excited I was about Hannah's book, and I commented that many young women who are as beautiful as Hannah is can get distracted by admirers and so on.

"She's a true introvert," he said. I asked him if there had been times when Hannah had wanted to give up on the book.

"Oh yes, there were plenty of times when she threw the manuscript across the room!" he said. 

Here's a photo of Susan and Sami:

Sami, as usual, was quiet, but at ease, and you could see how proud he was. He had been mentioned quiet a bit in the part of the book which Hannah read. Holding his hand walking through the desert to school as a young child, going for a ride with him in the Superstition Mountains and getting stuck, and his telling her stories of that other desert far away in Palestine, which he had come from.

Driving home from the party, it was a little scary merging onto the 101, near their home. I got up to freeway speed to merge, but the average traffic seemed to be going 20 mph faster! It was Saturday evening, and crowded. Other times that I have driven home from her house,  it's been Sunday evening, much less hectic.

While I was gone, Dale Sr. had been busy. He had taken out the smoked turkeys and pork "butts", cut them up, put the meat from one in our fridge, and and took everything else over to his garage on 5th Ave;, where he has a "deep freeze."

When I got home I realized that I still didn't know who was going to accompany me to hear Rick Steves speak the next day. I had two tickets waiting for me at "will call" and I'd posted on the travel club's group Facebook page, asking who wanted to go. Both Nancy A. and Mary, long-time members who have become friends, had said that they were interested.

To decide who was going to go, I  posted on the travel club's group Facebook page a list of numbers, starting with your address, 1261, and going through 1970. I asked Ann, my co-organizer, to pick a number, and the winning number would be the one that was closest to Ann's choice. Nancy A. had selected a number, but I hadn't heard from Mary.

In this photo, Nancy A. is second from left in the middle bottom photo, and Mary is on the far right:
 

Luckily I had both of their phone numbers. I called Mary, and it turned out that she was in Flagstaff anyway. So I called Nancy A. and told her that she was the one.

Sunday morning, I made a flier about our club, just in case there was a place where it would be convenient to hand them out to people, and had a hundred of them printed up. I didn't end up handing out any of them, there was no convenient place and Nancy A. thought that there might be rules against it at the Mesa Arts Center.
 

On the way in, the "Ted Radio Hour" was airing on National Public Radio.  The subject was small acts of leadership, how everyone has an opportunity to jump in and get involved whenever they "find a vacuum". I realized that I myself had done many things that fit into this category:  starting the travel club my other meetups, coaching the drama club and deciding that I had to take some initiative and figure out what to do about the woman who had been monopolizing the conversation at the last two travel club meetings.

It was fun going with to the talk Nancy A. She worked for American Airlines for years, and before that she was a travel agent. So she has a lot of inside knowledge which is valuable to our club, as well as a caustic, hilarious sense of humor. We chatted with people in line, and a couple of women sitting next to us (whom I did quietly offer a flier, on the way out, and they seemed pleased to get it).
It was valuable talking to Nancy A. about Susan, the woman whose monopolizing of the conversation had caused me so much consternation at our last two meetings. I told Nancy A. that after talking to my sister and to others with experience at moderating  discussions, I had decided that more initiative on my part was needed, but had feared I did not have the personality to be able to do so, and was rather fearful of the next meeting.

 However, because of discussing the subject with the other members outside of the meeting, and realizing how much they supported me, when the time came I'd felt  more comfortable with "jumping in and interrupting her" than I had thought I would.
(Nancy had also recommended to me a couple of books on the subject, one of which Wendell particularly liked.)

Nancy A. said that not once did it seem as though I was "taking over" or being bossy, at our last month's meeting. This was good to hear.

I really did enjoy the Rick Steves talk. He is one of my heroes, not just for popularizing the idea of non-luxury travel, but for the way he uses his "pulpit" to broaden his viewer's and readers' ideas. I took a lot of notes, and I intend to write them up as an article on my travel website and also use them as a springboard for conversation at our upcoming meeting.

In person he was taller than I had realized, and quite elegant in jacket, pressed shirt, jeans and boots. He has an easy, confident stance and seems less nerdy than he seems on the television shows. His many little jokes went ever well, the whole thing felt relaxed and comfortable.

I was pleased that he didn't refrain from referring to his political views now and then.

At the end of the talk, he cleverly "prepped" those in the audience whom he knew would autographs or photos with him. He said that if they'd just gather in a crowd around him (he called it an "Irish line") with whatever they wanted autographed ready, and with their cell phones in photo mode, he'd just keep rotating around until he got to everyone.. Out of a crowd of 500 or so, there were about thirty people waiting to do this.

I waited with the crowd of people outside. He was patient with all the people who handed him their phones to him, taking "selfies" with them. He was very agreeable and pleasant (this was, after all, an audience of people who'd contributed to PBS to be able to attend) but I thought he looked tired. 

One man engaged him in an extended conversation, which seemed so thoughtless to me.

I waited until the crowd had thinned out enough that I was one of the people standing right around him. I jumped in when someone's sentence ended, putting my hands together in front of my heart, "I just wanted to say 'thank you' for 'Travel as a Political Act' ".

"You're welcome", he said with a warm smile. it was the liveliest expression he'd worn since starting to do all of the 'selfies'. "It's fun talking about that stuff." I smiled back, and left him to the next person, thrilled to have had a personal interchange with someone who I have admired for many years.

('Travel as a Political Act' is Rick's second book, in which he describes his trip to Iran, going down to El Salvador to march in a protest march, his efforts for the legalization of marijuana, among other things.)

When I got home, Dale Sr. told me that he'd put the turkey carcasses on to boil and ended up with ten pints of the smoked-turkey broth, which makes such delicious chicken soup. He gave part of the meet from the one turkey he took over there. to his cousin Pete, who came by to give him his hunting permit for their upcoming elk hunt.

Yesterday morning I finally went to the doctor about the bump on my left hand. He said that it was nothing to worry about, sometimes tissue gets built up on the tendon. If it got to the point where it was interfering with the use of the finger (it's not, at all) then they recommend a cortizone shot (which would have to be given by a hand surgeon). In extreme cases, surgery is needed. But for now, nothing needs to be done. What a relief! (I did tell him that I am left-handed.)

On the way home I stopped to at the travel agents' as I wanted her help with the Christmas tickets. She found a good deal for me on one of them, though the plane departs at 5:30 AM from Phoenix. All and all it wasn't as expensive as the holiday tickets usually are. (I am coming both from the 11th-14th, and also from the 22nd-26th.)

I also stopped at Costco to order some photo prints to send to Helen. What a madhouse in there!  I ran into a former co-worker, Gigi Goldstein,  who was the person who suggested to me, a few years ago, when I was talking to her after yoga class, that I should accompany you to your next physical and make sure they order a full panel of blood tests for you. Nancy and I did do this,  thus finding the Vitamin B 12 deficiency that you had until Joseph started giving you the monthly B-12 shots. It was good to see Gigi, I used to see her regularly at yoga class every Saturday., but during this tumultuous year, I haven't had time to attend yoga.



Some of the crowds at Costco:

As you will remember, I'm flying up to John's this weekend for their carol-singing party. Dale Sr. has shrink-wrapped a hunk of smoked salmon for me to take up there with me. I'm also taking John the framed drawing of the Mexican gentleman playing the 'guitarron':





I hope you are feeling well when you read this and that everything is going okay.

Love, Lennie