"Migrant Trail" Walk Starts Tomorrow

Hi all,

Taking off tomorrow. All packed up!I made this shirt especially for the trip, it's got sleeve cuffs that fold down over my hands, and is extra long for modesty in "certain situations".

Don't know how long that smile will stay on my face!

Dale Sr. will drive me into Tempe where I join my friend Ann for coffee before attending her church (an off-shoot of Catholic but they don't follow a lot of the rules, and rent rooms in other churches to meet in) and then we drive to this other woman's house and down to Tucson. Organizational meetings in Tucson tomorrow afternoon (Sunday) and Monday we are bused over the border to the town of Sasabe, right over the border.  After a ceremony in Sasabe, we cross the border, on foot, and start walking. 

We will have several support vans, some of the staff have medical training, and if I can't walk the whole thing, Ann tells me that I can be rotated onto a committee which rides in the vans and helps set up the camp so it's ready when the walkers get there. We sleep on the ground.

I gave Nancy the "emergency number" only to be used to contact me if there is a family emergency. Ann has bought an international phone, so if there is a reason I really need to call out, I can use that.

Love, 
Lennie

Birthday Party with Play Fountain

Hi Mom and family,

Josh Gargalione, the son of Dale Sr.'s best buddy Jerry, had a party for his one year old son Francis yesterday. 

Here I am waiting for the party to start, while Dale Sr. and Jerry are talking fishing.

The party was at 8:00AM, which on a May Arizona day was a great time to have a party. Here's Jerry with his grandson:

I was so glad that Jerry's first wife, Yvonne, flew in from California with her present husband Chuck, for the party. It was so good to see her! We had many outings together with our kids, back in those days.

I was so glad when Dale Jr. arrived with his family! Here are Shayla and Ethan exploring a play castle. She is already crawling a little.

 Ethan had so much fun with the play fountain. It uses potable water and is made expressly for children to play in. 

He just played and played and played, it was fun to see him enjoying it so much. 

Here's  one of Michelle with Shayla:

 Love, Lennie

Pocket Opera

Hello Family,

It's very exciting that a house which Mariah designed has been featured in a national architecture magazine!

Madelyn, Joe and I have enjoyed talking with Tamika both days this weekend. She is a real character!

When I walked down the hill the day before, I'd checked out a flyer outside the venerable Hillside Club, and had noticed that the "Pocket Opera" was performing there the following day (Sunday). 

So, after checking  with Joseph and Madelyn, I decided to attend.

The performance was absolutely amazing. Those voices! Especially when several of them, or the chorus, sang together, the whole room seemed to vibrate.

By the time I got there, the audience, mostly older people and 2/3 female, was lined up outside. 

The Pocket Opera performs operas in English (all translated by Donald Pippin, the director, announcer, and pianist) with a paired down cast. The orchestra consisted of around 20 people and was seated directly behind the singers, in plain sight on the stage. The chorus was maybe 20 also. All the singing seemed to me absolutely top-notch. Comedic talents were what surprised me the most.

Pagliacci's plot concerns a performance in a small town by a Comedia de'Arte troupe in a very unsophisticated small town in the Italian countryside. The plot of the "play within a play" is that Columbine (shown here listening for her lover, sorry for the lack of focus) is actually planning to run away with a man from the small town. Her husband, after venting his rage in a mighty voice, stabs her 'for real' in front of all of the villagers, who give voice to their shock with a mighty musical chorus, the lover stabs him, and three end up piled on top of each at the end, a true operatic ending.

 
After an intermission, shown below, the cast also performed "Galatea", an operetta in a style which reminded me of Gilbert and Sullivan. I had thought I wouldn't be that impressed by the operetta, but the singing and the comedy and staging were delightful. The whole audience laughed out loud in enjoyment, many times.

   Anyway, it was great! I checked the schedule and there is no way I'll be in Berkeley for their one remaining Hillside Club performance, too bad!

Madelyn made another delicious dinner, sausage and rice made with that delicious chicken sausage which she buys at a local shop.

 I cooked last night, Chicken Ettoufee without thickening the gravy as much. I ended up freezing most of it. Mom seemed to really like the rice and broth part of it the most.

Love,
Lennie








 

A Quiet Berkeley Day

We had a nice quiet day at Campus Dr. 

It was fun having the lively Tamika here. She made Mom a good breakfast.


I walked down the hill to Andronico's and back, returning with another half-gallon of milk, some ingredients for Monday night's dinner, and two bottles of my favorite red wine, LAN Rioja.

I enjoyed looking at the unique Berkeley houses and the lush gardens.

Andronico's was busy as always...

Madelyn made a wonderful dinner of pork with onions and apples, roasted sweet potato, cauliflower and mushrooms, and salad...

We had a nice evening...

Jennie arrived at 9:00, and we had a nice chat with her. 

I went to bed early, around 9:00... so "that's all she wrote!"

Love,
Lennie 

Photos from the Last Two Weeks

Hi Mom and family,
It has been a couple of weeks since I last posted a blog. For a while, my laptop seemed to have died (my computer tutor pointed out that when it says "disk read error", all you have to do is to hit it!)

Also, there was all the stress and excitement around my drama club's performance, with lots of extra trips up to the Boys & Girls Club for extra practice with this one or that one. The performance, of two short scenes, went well.

I haven't got as much work done outside as I'd hoped. Here are a couple of photos of the lot across the street, taken end of April, on a nice windy, cloudy day.

My weekly long walks, training for the Migrant Trail hike in early June, has yielded lots of photos of my home town. In Arizona, there aren't very many trees for young couples to carve their initials into...so the next best thing is permanent marker on a rock!

Or spray paint on the edge of a culvert...

 Cactus flowers:

Our beloved Elvira's restaurant has suddenly closed and no one seems to know why. The current owner, Eddie Valdez, who once was Eb Clark's apprentice as a mine carpenter, had done beautiful remodeling on it and bought in a whole roomful of carved and painted tables and chairs from Mexico. He kept all of Elvira's original recipes. And it was always packed!

The famous Superstition Mountain:

Walking back from the library a storm was coming up, and these ironwood blossoms were swaying in the wind. I took several shots before I got them in the photo.

Thunderheads over the Apache Trail...

What a combination in one shop:

I hadn't reached my goal yet, so the next morning I was walking again.

Mom, you may remember the Gypsy family who was living across from us at one time. They have moved down the street, and they're still making patio furniture:

Stopped in at Starbuck's...

and ran into Dale Clark Sr.'s second cousin, Tylene. Her father and Eb Clark (Dale Sr.'s father) were descended from twin sisters who lived in Young, Arizona. Whenever I run into her at Starbuck's, we have good chats.

 

  
I walked on up to Shady Way Nursery, where I buy almost all of my plants. They have a large selection of native plants.

 
On my way home, the Superstition Mountain from the ApacheTrail...

 
The next day Dale Sr. and I went to the huge Dick's sporting goods store. I miss Sports Authority, the service at Dick's was lackluster at best. I bought some leggings hoping they would solve the "heat rash when walking ten miles in the heat" problem. (They did not.) The sky was so beautiful, cleaned by the rain.

Yesterday, Tuesday the 11th, I flew to Berkeley in the early morning. I got this photo as the plane flew over the Sierra Nevada...

I got off BART at Ashby and walked along Shattuck to the Starbuck's, where I used Google Maps téo figure out a route around Berkeley which would fit my weekly 11 mile goal.

Turning from Shattuck down University, I saw these dough hooks in the window of a bakery-café, one of the cafés that Sandy likes.

 
A flyer plastered onto a street light pole told me that Los Lobos are playing in Berkeley, this very Friday! Ooh, I wish I could go!

Some nice grafitti art, I think this one looks like it was commissioned.

I walked back to Ashby station and had a meal at a place called Flaco's where I had some kind of kale open faced taco on a very thick whole-wheat tortilla. 

 Across from me a guy wearing a leather kilt and a crocheted robin-hood shaped hat kept whooping and hollering as he carried bows and arrows in and out of a place called "Trackers". The building was the site of Mountain Works outdoors supplies (which at one time was a funeral home when I was a kid). 

The little restaurant I lunched at, sitting outside on their shady, garden-y patio, was well-run,  but turned out to be a vegan taco place. Marisa looked it up and it said "muted flavors" which I would agree with. My "taco" was beans, rice, kale and lettuce on a thick whole wheat tortilla.

Later, Marisa looked  up Trackers, and the place gives wilderness survival classes. 

 
As my route took me up to Telegraph Ave., I decided to go up Ward St., and take a look at the "Motor House" where I lived for several years in my early twenties. 

I wouldn't have recognized the house except that I did remember the address, and the huge tree in the back yard of the house next door. The one-time "Motor House"  had really been spruced up. I remembered hanging out with Steffie and Fran on the front porch.

 
Actually the whole street seemed to have had a face-lift, all the houses freshly painted and the gardens lovingly tended. I remembered this gorgeous Victorian on the corner, though back then it had weathered white paint and an overgrown yard.

I don't remember seeing these beautiful shrubs in Berkeley when I lived there. Are they datura, and aren't they poisonous? Anyway, there seem to be quite a lot of them now, bright yellow and white also.

Getting up to Telegraph Avenue, I saw this mural on the former Willard Jr. High. Joseph says he thinks it is now some sort of alternative school. 

My first job was in a tiny Indian restaurant, one of the little restaurants in this place, also on Telegraph...

 
So sad to see Shakespeare's books with this plywood barrier around it. 

The "Med" (the Café Mediteraneum) is still there, though, and seems just the same...

 

The inside of the bathroom door was interesting...

A couple more old friends from "the Ave", the sign for Rasputin's and the one for Amoeba...

Then I crossed the campus...

Reaching the intersection of Hearst and Euclid, I turned west again, for the final side trip which would be necessary to reach my eleven-mile goal. This delightful elephant carving was attached to the front of the Thai restaurant at the corner of Shattuck and Cedar.

I passed a tree root which looked like an elephant foot, and looked up at the massive tree trunk...

On Vine St. I was glad to find the original Peets. (I'd heard that the Peet's coffee company had been bought by a former Starbuck's person...there are now Peets coffee places in airports and Peets coffee in Arizona grocery stores...

Walking up the hill, I saw this beautiful tree on La Loma...

And this view of the bay...

Love,
Lennie