Good morning! It's Monday, and I think I'll get a few Monday things off my mind for today. There's lots to think about and say. Taterton is off to the San Diego Department of Motor Vehicles, hoping to breeze through his driver's license renewal more easily there than in Chula Vista. I wish him the best and hope he is made happy by the experience. (It becomes more worrisome as we age, my children.)
An important part of my Monday morning experience is always looking in on the blog of James Howard Kunstler's blog, Clushterfuck Nation. Kunstler, a denizen of Saratoga area, New York state, is a very smart man who is writer, social commentator, urban architecture critic, wit, wonderful painter, and you should go to his site, http://www.kunstler.com/, and click on all the links. I haven't checked the paintings for a while, but they are wonderful and perfectly evocative of the fading buildings and the terrain surrounding that northern New York area. He write this blog every Monday morning and in this particular part of his interest and expertise, he concentrates on Peak Oil and the repercussions to our lives as oil peaks and fails. Which he has absolutely no doubt that it's doing. Today's link touches on the subject of renewal and refurbishing and rebuilding of our nation's passenger train service, and I couldn't agree more that it needs to be done NOW. Whenever the subject comes up in the papers, it's slid into "fast rail"...NO, we need to fix up our intercontinental SLOW RAIL and get it on the tracks. As a lover of trains and train travel, I feel that it is so important. One of these days, it may be the only way to get from San Diego to, say, Iowa...and it needs to be humanly feasible. Comfortable seats built to a human scale, reasonable and nourishing food, good scheduling and planning. Why is this not being done? Only last year, when I was in Cedar Rapids, I read of a plan to run a train from Chicago to eastern Iowa...which was being turned down. Why? "Well, we already have a perfectly good bus system, " puffed some presumably red-faced politco of Iowa...Hello, Iowa! You don't! You are not even on the Greyhound grid. I have never known a place that was so hard to get into and out of as Iowa. And if what Kunstler (and others) are predicting comes true pretty soon, there won't be gasoline for those fabled buses anyway. WE NEED TRAINS, SLOW TRAINS, FAST TRAINS, LITTLE TRAINS, BIG TRAINS. WAKE UP IOWA and everybody else. Fix up those ancient tracks. Make more engines that will run on coal, which at least we shall have after petroleum is gone, for a while.
Enough of that, and I will now slide into finishing up yesterday's story about one trip I made to Iowa. After I went into that railway station, I consolidated my ticket and made sure I had a sleeper into Omaha. And I went to the phone and called my friend from high school who lives in Denver. Always a wonderful idea, my dears, to call that friend. She came to pick me up and took me too her house for the few hours'wait for the train to Omaha. She gave me a sandwich and a drink. She brought out her husband whom I hadn't seen for many years and we had a nice visit. She went into the basement and gave me the walker belonging to her mother, Mrs Longnecker of beloved memory, which had been stored there since the older lady's decease. That walker came in so handy!!! It walked me all the way into San Diego some weekslater.
When I got into Omaha the following morning, I was greeted by my cheery forty five year old lad of a son, who was his same funny disrespectful self as he mocked, "Hobble, hobble, hobble," when I was trying to keep up with him in the gravelly rail-yards of Omaha. When we'd made the forty-five mile drive to Walnut, Iowa, my wonderful daughter-in-law took one look at my twisted ankle and made me be driven by her to the hospital in Atlantic IA, some twenty five miles in the other direction, where I was x-rayed and pronounced to have a fractured fibula and put into a stiff boot. Lucky. At Kaiser I would have been in an immobilizing cast. Then home to the family and the wonderful grandkids.
Thanks to the boot and walker, I got around well in Walnut, IA, for a few days before another incident put me into the emergency room in that aforementioned hospital and into enforced rest for several days. Without detail, I needed that time. So, when I got back to the house at Walnut, my stay had to be extended for a week, and the kids and I put it to good use playing cards and games. Though I like to say with glee that I gave my kids the "mother in law visit from hell," I have never had a better time than that lovely extra week in Walnut with my loved ones. Then I boarded the plane in Omaha and hobbled in with Mrs Longnecker's walker to my husband in San Diego. YAZZYBEL
No comments:
Post a Comment