I’m not sure what you did the last time you moved into a new house but what we did was head for Costco. There was stuff we had to have…a couch in the living room, some office furniture, perhaps a bed….and we hoped they would have it, and in fact they did, and it all worked out well, except for the office furniture part. Did you know that you can buy stuff that’s labeled “easy to assemble” that actually has 54 major wood parts and over 300 pieces of hardware? All truth, and that stuff, no matter how good you are, is gonna take you a couple of days to assemble, and at the end you have furniture that’s too heavy to move, so if anybody besides us ever owns this house I bet they will own this same piece of furniture because I sure as heck know I’m not disassembling it, except perhaps with an ax.

Towards the end there was one step that I thought (even at the time) was especially amusing. Basically it was the installation of the “tower”, a piece consisting of a three-shelf mini-bookcase-looking thing about three feet tall and a foot-and-a-little wide. Since the overall construction is an odd combination of iron- or rubber-wood (very heavy) and ultra-dense fiberboard (even heavier) even this relatively small tower is, you guessed it, heavy. And for some unknown reason, where every other major piece is fitted together with metal dowels that snap into metal locking hubs, n this one piece sits on the desk with nothing more to secure it than six glue-strips, the backing of which you remove just before you put it into place. I thought this was odd….clearly glue wasn’t enough to hold a heavy piece in place….until Irene and I man-handled it onto the desk at which point it sucked onto the desk like a huge abalone on a rock, stuck like it would be there until the end of time, actually all good except that it was stuck in the wrong place by about half an inch, which to Irene and my perfectionists’ eyes was a miss as good as a mile. If you ever actually have been abalone diving you know how tough it is to pry one off its rock, right? It was twice that tough to get this thing to move, and the sound it made when it pried loose sent both Spryro the boy-dog and K.C. the girl-cat running at full speed for cover. I would have sworn it was taking the surface off the furniture at least, but it didn’t, and eventually all was well and it was properly re-secured, this time in its proper spot.

All is well  in truth, now, and I write to you from that very desk, and it doesn’t look awesome but pretty good, and I bet you, when you visit, can’t find where the “tower” initially went. Consider this your invitation.

Emeril’s Table 10 in Las Vegas is not the typical restaurant Irene and I would eat in. We are far too frugal for that, but this one time it seemed like a good idea. We hadn’t eaten at all, lunch time was long past, and we had played indoor pickleball in the morning at the Dula Center, walked the whole of the bizarre and camp-ily covered Fremont Street several times watching the characters with too much money suck up perfumed oxygen while getting their heads  massaged with unsanitary-looking battery-operated mutli-pronged stimulators and the other characters with no money at all discussing if a trashed then scrounged plastic bottle had a redemption value, looked for – with no success at all – a multi-way penny slot-machine ready to pay for our trip, had coffee at the dirtiest Starbucks we’ve ever seen this side of Bejing and generally needed nourishment and some positive reinforcement.  This indirectly led us to Table 10.

The experience itself was worth the $50 lunch tab, I suppose. It wasn’t so much the food itself – described quickly the food was ordinary; Calamari as an appetizer and Mahi-Mahi sandwiches with cole-slaw. But, and I suppose this is Emeril’s genius – BAM! – it was all a bit different and (dare I say it?) better than its less-pricey competitors. The Mahi-Mahi in particular was (at the time at least) the best I’ve ever eaten…a small sandwich on a home-made roll but with a thick and perfectly-done tender fish steak nestled gently in a pineapple-tomato relish that somehow worked very well. Plus, like I said, going in we were starving and coming out we weren’t so you chalk up the experience to being an experience and thus allow yourself the extravagant mid-day meal. Plus – and, hey, my “I hate people” attitude aside, I am a people-person in some ways, or at least I’m a waiter-person, and I LIKED Julio, who probably didn’t take any more special care of us than anyone else, at least his patter with them seemed identical to his patter to us, but he made good eye contact and shared his own personal views of the dishes and he wouldn’t have steered us wrong, right? So it was all good….

Until, two hours later, in our motor-home, Spyro walked, K.C. the Kit scratched, me laying down for just a moment to “rest my eyes”….my stomach began doing an old and remarkably familiar dance that I thought I had left behind when I stopped drinking 25 years ago, and one thing led to another, which led to a brief bout with the porcelain pony….I will spare you details here….

…and this in turn led to a relatively short-lived series of fairly profound (for me) thoughts, of which I share a small selection here.

1.  Is the experience of eating good food made less by the experience of throwing it up afterward?

2.  We all know, and I don’t need to belabor, how food is processed and what eventually happens to it. So perhaps we should short-cut the whole process and only eat minimum amounts of food and only as fuel? Perhaps the whole thing of “enjoying” the food we eat is an artificial creation, an emotional overlay that we add to a process that isn’t worthy of the effort anyway, given that it all comes out in the end (so to speak)?

3.   Does Emeril, in this case, owe me anything? Like my money back, an apology, a signed copy of his most recent cookbook? Or did he already give me what I paid for, and what I did with it was (somehow) my decision?

Obviously this type of mental masturbation does nobody any good. But, from the perspective of the range of alternatives presented to one when on their knees in the very tight confines of a motor-home water-closet, it’s better to think about those things than what is right in front of your face, as it were.

Or, in my usual fashion, did I miss the whole Zen-point…again?

Of course no essay that describes Las Vegas is complete without having some reflection on reality, as basically Las Vegas turns reality upside-down. Nothing is as it seems here. This includes, interestingly, The Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, which is, by my reckoning at least, is perhaps both the most upscale and least real Catholic Church I’ve ever seen. Located just off the strip, within an easy chip-toss, appropriately, of the Mirage, with a pastor who delivered a sermon in which he sang parts of Handel’s Messiah and who discussed his interview on Fox News the night before (where undoubtedly he gave his opinion on the economy and on China’s role in environmental affairs), nothing in this church looked like a Catholic Church is supposed to look.

What does this mean, you ask? Well, it’s easier to answer by asking a few questions of my own. What other Catholic Church has two deacons whose job it is to follow along behind the priest when he is shaking holy water over the congregation with mops to immediately dry the marble floors?  What other Catholic Church has vocational candles that are actually electrified and turn on and off with individual switches instead of actually burning? What Christian church of any denomination has a “Last Supper” scene cast in bronze at a scale of about six times life? There are many other examples but you get the drift.

But I am probably making something out of nothing. At the same time I seem to be criticizing, I have to say, to be fair, that the angel-voiced priest spent as much time talking about the upcoming food drive and the church’s mission in assisting folks who are HIV-Positive as he did singing. And the people in this decidedly upper-class building were as friendly as any I’ve seen anywhere, including Sister Pat, the semi-retired nun sitting in the row in front of us who shared that she had lived many years in San Francisco and for many years before that in Redwood City, which is next to San Carlos, CA., which is where, South of San Francisco, that Irene and I lived for many years.

So what conclusions can I draw from this, after all? Only the same one that I’ve come to realize plays so big in so many parts of my life. I don’t know much and what I do know is subject to change ‘cuz I’m probably wrong about that, too.

That said, pickleball appears for me to be an even longer journey. When we arrived at St. George, Utah a few days ago for the warm-up week before the pickleball tournament within the Huntsman World Senior Games (aka Senior Olympics) I was totally jazzed and looking forward to showing everybody how good I’d become since last year, which you know right away was a major no-no. It wasn’t so much that “they” showed me different but more that my anxiety to show somebody something made my doing virtually anything correctly somewhere between difficult and impossible. It was only after we (Irene and I) had lost our first four or six games that I settled down and began to hit one shot at a time…at which point my game slowly re-appeared from wherever it had been off hiding.

This was all very disheartening until I was, today, playing against and later watching a few of the “big boys”, no names mentioned, who had come in from various parts of the country and arrived at the courts for their first outing of the season today. I was now playing adequately, as was partner Steve, and although we got beat fairly handily by the big boys it wasn’t as handy as it had been last year, and by golly they were missing a few shots that they would most always have made, simple down-the-line forhands for instance, or hitting lobs into the net, or serving long, or dinking shots six feet on the wrong side of the in-line, or whatever…just like Steve and I. And they were obviously pissed about it, too…just like we have been. But, over the course of watching them play for about two hours, they very quickly were regaining form and were suddently were hitting the shots they had missed just those few minutes before, and looking, once again, like the top-flight players they are.

What’s the point? I could make many points out of this simplistic set of observations but what this certainly has to bring home is that pickleball is not a 50-year sport for me, while it may be a 20-year sport for some of the so-called big-boys, and that, for me, I will have to simply give myself some time, each year, to get back into the game…head and body, assuming I’m allowed to keep playing for awhile. But all that said, I am a better player than I was at this time last year. And, even when I don’t show it, I know it’s in there and can be re-discovered, while last year it wasn’t yet there at all. And, God willing, there may be other improvements still available to me, and perhaps I will discover them….one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time.

This excepts State Parks, naturally. State Parks very wildly, so much that it’s almost comical. You can have parks that have nothing at all in facilities, parks whose most attractive feature is that they are there and nothing more. And you can have places like the one we went to last year in West Virginia that had terraced sites a million miles apart from each other, sites so long you could land jets in them, so level they could have been pool tables, high above a lake pretty as a postcard, across from a golf course as green as the fruit of a ripe Kiwi. A beautiful park, if somewhat orderly in its beauty.

Soaring high above even that nice park is this one, Henry’s Lake near Last Chance, Idaho. Not that it’s the fanciest ornament on the tree; it’s not. It’s rather plain and on a plain as well, a high-desert plain with a mountain range over 10,000 feet rising behind it. The sites are large and well-spaced and level enough for government work, but what this park has is surprises of the natural kind. Last time we were here, a year ago I think, I almost feel over a cow moose and we released at least six magnificent Cut-Bows, an unusual hybrid between a Cutthroat and a Rainbow Trout that can reproduce and grow like crazy…the six we caught were at all at least 20 and mostly 22-23 inches, making them all between 3 + and 5 pounds, good fish for any fly-fisher and the highlight of last year’s Western States swing. But so far our visit here has equaled last year by the simple unexpected arrival of two magnificent bald eagles….one of which was promptly chased and scared away by two very aggresive seaguls; the second of which cruised our site repeatedly looking for something….a dead rabbit? A small Cairn Terrier?….and in the doing making us feel as if we were, just for a moment, part of his life, and it’s a nice feeling, being part of the life of an eagle.

I’ll trade off full-hookups for an eagle any time.

I have to say, though, that at the end of the day I am often glad I am still an RVer. We, too, have the same backyards as these guys, the same sunsets, the same access to superior Missoula services. And if our neighbors get pesty or that red-tailed hawk is too noisy eating his magpie dinner, we can change our backyard by the next day. I’d like to see Steve (the bigger-than-yours guy) try that trick.

Out here in RV-land many of the folks I run into are either (a) very settled in their beliefs and generally are fundamentally true to a Christian God (and generally don’t want to hear about any different possibilities), or are (b) not searching at all and don’t think even about a god, much less God. In between these two points there are people who are sure of themsleves in many different religions, including, in our brief wanderings, commited aetheists (stretching the definition of religion) as well as Jews, Muslims, Amish, and Muslims, plus some real hell-fire Baptists and other interesting Christians. All interesting folks and I keep waiting for lightening to strike and to tell me something that will save my own soul. So far it hasn’t, although occasionally it seems that Somebody IS trying to tell me something, and as example let me share with you an experience I had at a gas station in Wisconsin just a couple of days ago.

The older fellah that stepped gingerly out of a newish green pickup truck, other than being bigger than most guys and a little more crippled up, walking with aid of a cane, seemed pretty ordinary, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans like most folks in this cool wooded area, but his truck carried a neatly-printed sign saying “Lay Catholic Apostle for Christ” , or some such. I asked him what that meant, if he was, for instance, an ordained Deacon in the church, a position that’s always interested me for its level of commitment and one that I had explored, briefly, for myself.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m strictly a lay apostle. But I’ve been out here doin’ this for 25 years!”. Doing what, I asked? “Preachin’ to the sinners,” he said with a smile. “I’ve got 1.68 million miles on my cars doin’ this!” Man, I said, that is a LOT of miles! Where do you go? “I go where the sinnin’ is,” he replied. “Wherever the tough ones are! Here,” he said, “let me give you a present!”

I nodded amiably…thinking I would get another brochure or something, followed by a request for a donation, of course. Instead, he handed me two professionally-published books and two accompanying CDs. “One for you, one for a friend!” he smiled, clapping me on the back as he turned to go into the gas station to pay for his purchase.

Well, I thought, here it is at last…the meaning of life, coming to me unexpectedly, as I somehow knew it would, in this most banal of all places, a Wisconsin gas station….Paul being struck down from his horse by God on his way to war…that kind of unexpected visitation, albeit a trifle less dramatic. Nice….the meaning of life, in a book and a CD.  I placed a $20 bill on his seat while he was still inside, tossed the stuff into our car and took off.

I wish I could tell you that they did contain the meaning of life. I mean, entitled as they are “God Speaks, Will You Listen?”, clearly they were directed exactly towards my search…how could they be wrong?

Well, the publishing is certainly the high point of their existence. The content is trivial…simple readings with no explanations done by a fellah whos ounds like he might be still in his teens, a monotone recantation of the same things I’ve read for myself in the New Testament, not that there’s anything wrong with the readings, there isn’t, but it doesn’t go any further, doesn’t tell me a thing, just sorta pissed me off that it doesn’t INFORM me or inspire my belief or anything at all.

Well, I can take hope in the fact that, although it appears I’m still looking in the wrong places, the places I’m looking are beginning to appear to be more like the right places. And, maybe like Paul, I will be struck with belief at some point. Or, maybe like Jimmy Buffet says, it’ll just turn out that the Hokey-Pokey really IS all it’s all about, after all. In any event, it’s nice being out here, and I can still look around…we’re in Minnesota now…and it’s still all green and lovely and all, and while it doesn’t NECESSARILY prove the existence of a god, it doesn’t say there isn’t one, either. And it’s a nice place to hang out, this world, isn’t it?

Yes, I know what she means, hard to miss her meaning accompanied as it were by hand-gestures signifying, if not mountains, then at least large mounds. But seeing big steaming piles of moose evidence is not the same as seeing a moose. When I was last in Alaska I had been out running (outside of Anchorage if I remember correctly) and was on a dirt road pretty far outside the city limits, doing a run of maybe ten miles. I was more or less at the end of the run as dictated by my stop watch and was thinking about turning. I decided “just a bit further”, went up and over a rise, and came within five feet of running broadside into a cow moose, thankfully without calf (or otherwise I might not be here talking about the story), and she simply looked at me disdainfully, put her nose back into the underbrush and continued filling her belly. I back-pedaled as fast as I could, reversing nearly in mid-stride as I did so, perhaps looking more like Michael Jackson doing a moon-walk than the middle-aged jogger I was, and beat my time out by ten minutes getting back.

Wisconsin, our current stop, doesn’t have the same claim to fame as the town in Michigan (in fact we’re told you’d need to go to Canada from here to see a moose) but it, too, has its attractions. For instance, Woodruff, the place right around the bend from the Hiawatha RV Park where we are staying, claims to have the World’s Biggest Penny. This was a strange enough fame-claim to inspire Irene and I to go looking for it. Turns out it is simply a painting of a big penny, although all the banners in town proclaim “world’s largest penny” and why they think that seeing a PAINTING of a big penny is the same as seeing a big ‘ol COPPER penny is beyond me, any more than I understood, in Michigan, how seeing the evidence of a moose can be considered the same as a moose or how you can have the U.S. Moose Capital without having a visible moose.  Heck, I don’t know…I just go where we are pointed half the time, looking for something to write home to mother about, or in the advent of her not being available, I gladly settle for you, especially in that your expectations are so low, knowing us as you do.

That may be all the word on Wisconsin I have to share at the moment. We have not fished here at all, alth0ugh the small-mouth bass water nearby looks invitingly rocky albeit a bit low. Also we have NOT eaten a Pastie (Pass-tee), the famous meat pot pie. We have not eaten any fried cheese curds, nor have we attended any of the many Friday all-you-can-eat fish fries sponsored by everyone from Elk’s Lodges to boy scout trouts, generally, it seems, followed by blackout bingo. St. Germaine, down the street from us about ten miles, also has a Monday flea market of some size and fame, which we missed coming in, and a very large farmer’s market on Wednesdays, which interests us Local-vores quite a bit although we will miss that as well on the flip-side as we drivers say, leaving at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning as we are to visit good friends Tom and Jean in Minnesota, where I intend to beat Tom’s butt in pickleball….once again, and this time with the expectation he will bawl like the baby he is.

In the meantime, I need to get us ready, so I’d better get on it. I have a drawer face that’s pulled off, a toilet seat that’s loose, a sewer tank that needs to be flushed, etc. etc. It’s hard to roll when pieces are falling off here and there, personally and otherwise, but a screwdriver can take care of the coach. Actually, overall it’s tough out here but it’d be tougher anywhere else in these perilous times and we are making the best of it. No sense your feeling sorry for us, if you were.

Shaq's Shoe!

…and OH my gosh….how I DO run on. But do you get that EVERYTHING is here? Between the Archives and the Smithsonian there’s a beautiful park containing dozens of exquisite statues and a chlorinated pool where you can take your shoes off to soak your feet, and so many people were doing it, it felt like we were in Lourdes except instead of prayers I heard people talking about what they had seen and everybody was talking about something different.

"Where Do We Go Next?"

One poor little rich girl near me, a teenie-bopper wannabe all of maybe 14 but wearing a grand’s worth of casual elegance, was grilling her daddy mercelessly about what’s this, what’s that. This kid knew nothing, she didn’t know that Gerald Ford had been Nixon’s eventual choice for and served as VP, she didn’t know who Nixon was, for heaven’s sake, but her curiosity had been awakened by somethng that wasn’t on an Ipod, something that couldn’t be captured by Tweeting, something that was over and above texting….she was waking up to her own country – and her father, bless his heart, was doing his undereducated, overmoneyed best to explain his way out of a trap of his own creation. And no matter how poor a job he was doing, and frankly it was pretty piss-poor, he was giving it that old Mississippi State try, and both he and his daughter wouldn’t forget THIS day very soon, and neither would anybody else in their family, and for the most part neither would any of the other dozens of families we saw, heard and watched during the long, tiring day, and neither will Irene and I, truth be known, and tomorrow we get to get up even earlier and go do even more of this, bless us both for being such lucky ducks.