​            In case you are just joining us: Sherrill, my wife, and I were married 52 years, during which we visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States.  This is number sixteen of a projected series about our lives and travels, many of them with our daughter Simone. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. I hope you enjoy these glimpses into our lives.             
 
    "They must have been really good people," Simone said. 
    We were at Fruitlands, the commune started by Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's father, and others from Concord, including Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Louisa May Alcott wrote about it in her journal ("I love cold water!") and later Hawthorne published a novel based on the experience.  We were there in 1977, a year after the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and birth of the United States.  In 1976, people from all over the country traveled to the Boston Freedom Trail and other places where the revolution exploded and was won.  A year later, we rationalized, it would be less crowded. 
    Yes, we paid our respects to the courage of the colonists and revolutionaries, but we also found ourselves spending equal time at literary landmarks—as long as we were in the neighborhood, of course.  Even before we left home, I was talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald's old stomping grounds and where Poe, Whitman, and Hawthorne had lived and worked.
       Sherrill gave me a look.
       "You're such a romantic," she said.
        "A romantic?"
      She patted me on the cheek:  "Don't worry about it, sweetie."

​            A costumed high school girl took us through The House of Seven Gables in Salem, reciting a speech she'd almost memorized and in Concord we visited the Alcott's Orchard House, where—surprised by how small the rooms were—we recognized scenes from Little Women.  We stopped at Ralph Waldo Emerson's home, looked at Thoreau's overgrown Walden Pond, and at the Old Manse saw messages scratched by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, using the diamond on her wedding ring.  
            Fruitlands, as stark as the old place was, particularly resonated with us—maybe because we, too, had been part of a group that tried to start a commune.  That gentle band of Transcendentalists and writers who wanted to give up the vanities of life and share everything touched our hearts.  We also found a more recent literary landmark In Concord.  The mystery and treasure hunt in Jane Langton's The Diamond in the Window had gripped us when we read it and here was the house described in the book, a Victorian Queen Ann with its pointed tower, standing where it was supposed to be. 
            Trying to stick to our patriotic agenda, we visited the Old North Church and State House in Boston, then Boston Common and Public Garden, where Simone walked up to the life-size bronze statues of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings marching past the lake.
            "Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack," she said, naming the ducklings, "Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack."  When she was younger, Sherrill and I read the book Make Way for Ducklings to her so many times that we all three had memorized it. 
             Sherrill and Simone humored me after our visit to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, when I wanted to visit Walt Whitman's house across the Delaware River in Camden.  The streets were full of potholes and the neighborhood rundown, but it didn't seem like anything to be scared about.  Eventually, we found, across from a bulky building that looked like a prison, the little house Whitman bought in 1884 and lived in until his death.
            "Are you sure we should be here?" Sherrill asked as she parked in front of the narrow frame house.
            I shrugged.  "Why not?" 
            "I hope nothing happens to the car."
            We didn't know then about Camden's reputation.  Later, when we mentioned our visit to a friend, he blurted, "You did what?" Apparently, at that time, Camden had the highest murder rate of any city in the country. 
            "Well, the car survived and we survived," I replied. 
            Once again, Sherrill patted me on the cheek.  

​            I didn't have to work so hard to persuade her to drive north to the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park, but—as much as we admired Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—it was Washington Irving's home at nearby Tarrytown that delighted us.  The eccentric Dutch-inspired house that Irving designed for himself, with its gardens and paths and views of the Hudson River not only was the home of the man who created Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman, but also was a mini-paradise in which we could imagine ourselves living.   
            We had a good visit with my aunt and uncle in Arlington while we were in the Washington D. C. area, and then explored the city, from the Capitol Building to the Mint to the Smithsonian museums and the great monuments.  We were touched the most by the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, but that may have been because of the power of their words carved on the marble walls.  Continuing through Virginia, we a felt a similar power at Monticello, a quiet wisdom that reflected the personality that created it. 
            Williamsburg was supposed to give us an idea of how people in the colonial period lived, but everything was so tidy that it was hard to see men and women and children living there, despite the pretend colonists baking bread and hammering out horseshoes.  
            "What I really want to do while we're in New York," Sherrill told me after we looked at the view from the top of the World Trade Center and spent several hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "is go to The Cloisters."
            Although she wasn't religious, the stylized boldness of Medieval art always spoke to Sherrill more than the art of the Renaissance.  After the galleries of icons, carvings, and manuscript pages, plus the magnificent Unicorn Tapestries, we strolled among the museum's gardens of medieval plants, identifying some of the flowers, herbs, and trees we'd seen in the tapestries. 
            Oh, no, I thought, now she's going to want a medieval section in our garden.
            Maybe it was a romantic notion, but before leaving New York, we had to ride through Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage.  As we passed the Plaza Hotel in the open carriage, I snapped several photographs of the fountain at its entrance.   
            "They're not here, now, you know," Sherrill told me, patting my knee. "Not for a long time."
            She'd understood that I was imagining Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in the fountain, open champagne bottle in hand, splashing under the watchful gaze of the bronze nude in the center. 

To be continued....


The next post in this series of A Marriage in Motion will skip a week and appear on Monday, September 11.
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If you enjoy these posts, please share them with anyone else you think also will find them interesting. You also might enjoy reading the new bargain-priced e-edition of my 1966 North Beach novel, The Night Action.  Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  

​       The little poodle that lived in the old auto court was blind, but nobody seemed worried about him, even with cars coming and going day and night.  We stayed there three years in a row when we drove north to Ashland in southern Oregon for the annual Shakespeare festival.  Sometimes, we went with friends, other times we met them there.  Eventually, one family moved to Ashland, so we stayed with them for a few years.  Ashland was still a small town, then, swelling during the summer season.  Gradually, the festival grew and the town grew.  More restaurants opened, motels were built and bed-and-breakfasts opened, more shops with festival souvenirs opened.  The blind dog and his auto court disappeared. 
​        We were staying at the White Motel on the edge of Ashland the day President Nixon resigned. 
         "It's my birthday," Simone complained,  "but everyone is watching television!"  

​          Ashland was just one of the west coast destinations around which our travels began to focus.  As our lives evolved, so did our travels.  Looking back, it seems inevitable that, with work and school schedules, we'd stay closer to home.  Our trips grew organically from our lives, giving us new kinds of memories.  Friends moved to Oregon, so that became a destination.  Other friends had a vacation place in northern Washington—another destination we hadn't thought of before.  Others moved to southern California.  Some friends enjoyed camping out, so on occasion we joined them.  It was a big world, but that didn't mean that we needed to cover big distances to have memorable experiences.  Shorter trips also made it possible for us occasionally to take more than one in a year.  Sometimes, we traveled to visit friends, other times we traveled with friends.  More and more, Simone's friends joined us on trips—or she joined them.  

​            These short trips flicker past in memory so quickly that they tend to blur together. I'm not sure exactly when we bought Simone several outfits—including a gypsy and a unicorn—at the Shakespeare festival costume sale or when sushi I ate at a little Ashland restaurant made me sick for a whole night.  I couldn't tell you when we stopped in the Danish community of Solvang on our way to Los Angeles and the cliff-top Getty Museum in Malibu or exactly when we stayed overnight in scorching Red Bluff on our way north or which summer we roughed it with friends at Berkeley's Echo Lake Camp in the Sierras or which snowy Easter we stayed at Yosemite.  All I can be sure of is that we and our friends covered a lot miles up and down the west coast between San Diego and Victoria, British Columbia.  We didn't know yet that car trips like these were destroying the atmosphere and therefore the planet.
            "I don't mind the driving," Sherrill once told me on the way to Ashland, "but don't expect me to drink that Lithia Water."  All of us were disgusted by the rotten egg smell and taste of the natural springs in Ashland's Lithia Park, but most of us tolerated it because supposedly it was good for us.  Not Sherrill.  

​            However, she worried aloud that she might destroy the car on the unpaved road winding through the forest to the Hood Canal in northern Washington.  No one else was around for miles and this was decades before cell phones. 
            "Worse than any road in Mexico," she muttered grimly.  At least, we weren't attempting it in the rain, I told her, pointing out the foot-deep ruts.  "Don't fret," she said.  "I wouldn't."
            Then the dusty gray forest opened up to a scene out of an old western movie: two little cabins of weathered wood, a rustically fenced pasture, a little unpainted barn, and blue-green water from melting snow and glaciers rushing past.  There was no denying the beauty of it all.  Our friends' cabins had no electricity, running water, or heat except for small wood-burning stoves, but the kids loved living like pioneers in the forest.  The water was too frigid for swimming, but we never knew what animals might greet us when we went for a morning walk.  A porcupine or skunk?  A deer or two?  Or maybe a cougar?  
            This didn't turn out to be exactly a restful experience—it was seldom comfortable and there were always chores to do—but it was unique for us and memorable.  And we could gather fresh clams along the shore and follow trails near the cabins to pick thimble berries.  The forest around us was decorated with colorful, grotesque, and sometimes beautiful mushrooms and other parasites of all sizes, none of which were edible.  

            On one trip, we took a car ferry from Washington to Victoria in British Columbia.   The carriage ride around the old city and tea at the classic Empress Hotel were fun, but for Sherrill the objective was the huge Butchart Gardens just north of town. 
            "Look what you can do when you have space and money," I grinned. 
            "And people to do the work," she countered. 
          Our hillside garden in Berkeley kept us busy, but I had no doubt that this place would give Sherrill new ideas.  More than a hundred years ago, the Butcharts' original garden was started in an abandoned quarry, then a Japanese garden was added and a rose garden and Italian garden and on and on, everything designed to lead the visitor from one beautiful experience to the next.  Paths curved and meandered, disappeared and reappeared, enticed and surprised.  For the next forty years, I built and rebuilt and improved garden paths—and the garden beds growing around them, of course. 
            The months and years ahead took us in other directions on day excursions or week-long trips, from time to time even longer: to the California State Fair in Sacramento, to Oregon's astonishing Crater Lake and with friends to quiet Crescent Lake, also in Oregon, to the famous San Diego Zoo, to Santa Cruz and its Shakespeare festival on the forested university campus, to Long Beach for Thanksgiving on the moored Queen Mary, with one of Simone's friends to Disneyland again, and even to Honolulu again for Christmas with Sherrill's mother.  How lucky we were, we kept telling each other, to live surrounded by so many wonderful places. 
            "And how lucky you are," Sherrill pointed out, "to have a wife who's such a wonderful driver."
 
To be continued.... 
​
If you enjoy these posts, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels. You also might enjoy the new bargain-priced e-edition of my North Beach novel, The Night Action. Just click on the title link.

​            The sky darkened and fat raindrops began splotching the dusty windshield and hood, quickly gaining momentum, forcing Sherrill to struggle to stay on that narrow muddy road.  After a while, the jungle yielded to the outskirts of a town, the road dipping as it approached a river around a bend up ahead.  The traffic, such as it was, was backing up, the water rising around our car, threatening to drown the engine. 
            Several dripping boys waded up to us, shouting, finally making me understand that the road ahead was closed—the bridge was out.  They pointed to a detour.  I gave them a tip and we went the direction they said, hoping for the best.  Eventually, we realized that we'd reached the town of Campeche on the Gulf—very different than it is today, mostly un-restored, not yet a big tourist destination, despite its colonial history.  As far as we were concerned, its glory was a hotel where we could escape the storm and recuperate from the day.  
            The next morning, the storm had passed, the day was clear and hot (and humid), and—with a new tire and my swollen cheek—we continued on, visiting pre-Columbian ruins, starting with the Zapotec site of Mitla.  Its geometric friezes, carvings, and mosaics seemed so crisp and perfect that whoever made them might have just stepped out for a lunch break.  Chitzchen Itza and Uxmal were just as impressive in different ways, all of them home to hairy tarantulas, giant red ants, and scorpions.  It was hard for us to believe that Mayan priests—and their sacrificial victims—were able to climb those steep narrow steps to the tops of those huge pyramids.  Simone and I climbed part way a few times, but that was enough for us.   

​            The road played tricks with us, twisting and weaving through the jungle, sometimes with false promises of civilization, then back into that tangled maze of plant life, but eventually it  took us to the coast and the colonial city of Merida, one of the oldest cities in the Americas. Carved Mayan stones were used on the original Spanish buildings, but the spectacularly ornate homes of the central district dated from the 18th and 19th centuries.  Although a few had been fixed up, their baroque decorations repaired and painted, many still were run down and crumbling, although retaining a haunted beauty.  Today, many are being bought and restored, but then the city hadn't been so widely discovered, despite its charm.  We would've liked more time there, but soon the calendar demanded that we move on to Veracruz. 
            Despite its renegade atmosphere—or maybe because of it—Veracruz's central plaza was surprisingly busy in the evening.  Ignoring the heat and humidity, families and couples crowded the restaurants under arches along the sides, cigar-smoking old men played dominos in front of the colonial-era  city hall, and friends and lovers strolled around the square.  Today, this city founded by Hernan Cortes has a reputation for being one of the most dangerous in Mexico, but in 1972 we felt safe.  More than anything else, we felt the pull of history.
            The cathedral with its tile-covered cupola had survived centuries of sun and storm, revolution and war, even earthquakes.  Now it faced a row of electric-light-draped arches under which purple- and orange-skinned people swatted insects and stuffed spicy food into the dark O's of their mouths.  Mustachioed waiters in stained white coats bustled between tables, trays balanced on splattered shoulders.  Peddlers hustled in and out of shadows, shoving necklaces and postcards at diners.  Crusty-nosed kids hardly three-feet high juggled boxes of Chiclets over plates of mole.  Long-skirted women, babies hidden in rebozo folds, dangled beads and braided leather belts between German tourists and their plates. 
            Under one of those arches, Sherrill and I ate snapper veracruzana while Simone slowly spooned her flan.  We talked and ate and watched the passing scene—the cheapest show in town—until she fell asleep at the table, using her napkin for a pillow.  I carried her clutching it to our hotel room and brought it back the next day. 

​            Two days later, like good norteamericanos, we were prowling through shops in Puebla, studying the colorful Talavera tiles for which the city was noted.  Around us, colonial buildings were decorated with thousands of  tiles.  Sherrill was determined to take some home with us, despite their weight and the possibility of breakage.  Finally, she found some she liked and we even managed to get them to Berkeley without a single crack.  
            "Where is your other child?"  The officer aimed his handsome brown face with its thick black eyebrows and moustache at Sherrill.  The three of us were at the Mexico City airport, about to leave—we hoped—for San Francisco.  Sherrill looked at him, not clear what he meant.  "You each have a child on your entry form," he explained. 
            "When we came into Mexico," she said, "at the train station in Mexicali—they said we both had to put our daughter's name on the forms."
            "We only have one child," I pointed out.  "Look, it's the same name.  Simone."
            The officer looked at the forms and at Simone. 
​             "But where's the other one?  You can't leave him in Mexico." 
            "This is our only child named Simone and it's a girl.  Here she is."
            We'd forgotten that in Latin countries boys can be named Simone, too.  The officer seemed to be afraid that we were trying to abandon our son in his country.  Eventually, we did seem to persuade him that we only had one child and she was in front of him.  He stamped our papers and let us go to the airplane—all three of us—but I wasn't sure that he was entirely convinced about how many kids we had. 
            Sometime later, at home, we got a letter telling us to go to the San Francisco airport to pick up a package.  It turned out to be our missing camera—with the film still in it.  How it happened, we never knew.

To be continued....

           If you enjoy these posts, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels. Please share the posts with anyone else you think also will find them interesting.   

​            Our "honeymoon" trip was almost a decade behind us, but Mexico still fascinated us: its history and traditions, its art and architecture, and, of course, its role in our history.  Now that Simone was eight and such a good traveler, we thought why not go back and also explore the half-buried ancient civilizations of the Yucatan peninsula?  Sherrill even was willing to drive again—but not the whole distance. 
            We flew to San Diego and bused to Calexico.  That was the easy the part.  Then we carried our suitcases across the dusty border to the antique Ferrocarriles Nacionales de Mexico station.  Spanish and English collided under the cracked stucco ceiling: Norteamericano turistas and returning Mexicanos, suitcases, boxes, and baskets around their feet, were gathering to wait for a train everybody knew would be late.  Eventually, we boarded an aged Pullman car, once part of a streamliner that sped across the United States, now on the way south to Mexico City.  That evening when we went to dinner as we rocked over the Sonora desert, our green-upholstered seats were transformed to approximations of beds.
            By morning, rattling south across the Tropic of Cancer, we realized that the air-conditioning wasn't working.  We weren't sure that it had ever functioned.  On the way to the restaurant car, we passed curtained berths being turned back into seats.  Later, the car became a combination cantina and hacienda, over-heated people bringing out food and drink to share as we all sweltered and sweat.  Eventually, we clattered into Guadalajara, city of golden colonial buildings, ornate churches, and blossoming trees and vines.  An art deco observation/bar car was hitched onto the train for the final day and night, streamlined with silver walls, windows with Venetian blinds to blink at whatever it passed, and a sleek bar where we could indulge while the train struggled up to the plateau where Mexico City sprawled.  Before we got off, we discovered that our camera had disappeared.  Apparently, the safe place where we'd put it hadn't been so safe.  
            The huge Diego Rivera mural in the lobby of the Hotel del Prado in the heart of the city, lured us into its colorful, fantastic world: the grinning, strolling population in Chapultepec Park, barefoot kids, overdressed bankers, peasant women, vendors hawking balloons, Frida Kahlo and Diego, themselves, musicians and vendors, and upper class ladies in Sunday finery.  Best-dressed of all was Madame Death in feathered hat and elegant boa.  "Run kiddies, if you can," she seemed to say with her toothy grin.  "I'll get you in the end."  We also ventured out for a little sightseeing, including a boat ride among the meandering canals and artificial islands of the floating gardens at Xochimilco.  Today, pollution and sewage have ruined the beauty of this corner of the city, but then it still was a unique and popular excursion. 
            Before we left Mexico City, we bought a new camera—not as nice as the missing one, but adequate.  A day later, our rental car was churning up the dusty present on the way to Yucatan's colorful past, Sherrill weaving around ambling donkeys and sleeping cows and honking the horn at vultures in the center of the road reluctant to interrupt their meals, feathers and bits of flesh occasionally landing on the hood or windshield.   

            Small stern-eyed girls the color of the earth waited along the two-lane road, holding up great-tailed, wriggling green and yellow iguanas.  They looked as if they were dancing in the gritty sunlight with the bent-legged prehistoric beasts.  After a while, we reached the silver town of Taxco, waves of heat reflecting from walls and cobblestones as Sherrill steered around dust-caked cars and kids hawking trinkets and lottery tickets.  We found our hotel tucked away on a side street, stunted geraniums struggling by its door. 
            In the bathroom, I discovered that the shower sprayed the whole room; the only drain was in the middle of the tile floor. 
            "What did you do in here?" Sherrill demanded when I came out.
            "Just drown a few spiders and bugs."
            Simone peered in.  "Where are they?"
            "Drowned."
         Before we left town, we explored some of the hillside shops crowded with silver buckles and broaches, necklaces and bracelets, candlesticks and bowls, and other treasures made by local artisans.  Sherrill and Simone got small pins, silver animals that they wore to dinner on a shady terrace.  A day later, we were on the way to Acapulco and the Pacific Ocean.
            We stayed in a hotel on the Acapulco beachfront so that we could play in the lazy green waves.  Back then, the beach and bay were still unspoiled and not yet polluted.  That afternoon, we rode out into the bay in a glass-bottom boat.  The crew gave the three of us cool drinks in coconuts with straws.  Sherrill and I could taste rum in ours.  A little later, when Simone began to seem happily groggy, I tasted hers.  They'd put rum in it, too. 
            Sherrill wanted to see Tehuantepec, an historic coastal town known for its loyalty to a matriarchal past.  Some of the women still wore the old-time multi-layered white lace dresses because they represented the Zapotec tradition of female power.  Women, we saw, dominated the markets, as both sellers and buyers.  After another dip in the Pacific, we drove across the isthmus, about 120 miles, to the Gulf of Mexico, where we went into the water again, so we could say that we'd swum in both oceans on the same day.  
            The winners became gods and the losers were sacrificed: that was the payoff for the game played in the pre-Columbian ball court of Monte Alban.  The size of the stone buildings and the elegance of their carving impressed us.  Each of these ancient sites, we were discovering, had its own personality.  The elaborate stone work of Palenque, still partially covered by jungle, seemed baroque by comparison.  Once again, Sherrill was heroic as we drove further into the heat and humidity of Yucatan, the jungle thick around us.  Our cheap rental car had no air-conditioning, which didn't make life easier.  Then, miles from a garage, jungle stretching on both sides of the narrow steaming road, a rear tire collapsed with a grim lurch and bump.  When we'd rented the car, we hadn't thought to check in the trunk for a spare tire or jack.  Solemnly, I walked to the back of the car to look.
            "They'd better be here," I told a hairy orange tarantula watching me from the gravel at the edge of the road.
            "Good luck," he replied.  (Or maybe I had sunstroke on coming on.)
 
To be continued....  
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