Christmas Letter 2020

 

Christmas 2020

 

I’ve been thinking about the way, when

you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull

in their legs to let you go by. Or how

strangers still say “bless you” when

someone sneezes, a leftover from the

Bubonic plague.  “don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons from

your grocery bag, someone else will help

you pick them up.  Mostly, we don’t want to

harm each other.  We want to be handed our

cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to

the person handing it.  To smile at them

and for them to smile back.  For the

waitress to call you honey when she sets

down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the

driver in the red pick-up truck to let us

pass.  We have so little of each other, now.

So far from the tribe and fire.  Only these

brief moments of exchange.  What if they 

Are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we

say, “Here, have my seat,”  “Go ahead – you

first.”  “I like your hat.”

 

Danusha Laméris

 

I write this between the Advent Sundays of hope and love, two words that have taken on great significance in this difficult year. Despite the devastation of the global COVID-19 pandemic, our government’s response to it, and the deep and divisive political climate we have been living, Christmas still comes…with all the hope that each Christmas has always brought.

Merry Christmas!  It seems trite, those words, but those two words have brought hope and love for more than 1,500 years.  However you choose to celebrate this great bell-feast of the year, may it be a season of joy.  For me, it is, as Truman Capote so beautifully wrote in “A Christmas Memory,” a season that “exhilarates [my] imagination and fuels the blaze of [my] heart.”  I thank my mother for that, for it was she who modeled that blaze and exhilaration long, long ago.  Oh, the cinnamon-scented, tinsel-glowing memories of all those Christmases.

For many, the news from the past five years is not new but may only be known in fragmented forms.  Here goes…

TRAVEL: Still wintering in Mexico City, (now with Steve) although no longer doing any volunteer work. Mexico is a country that lacks a culture of volunteerism, and it just wasn’t worth going up against a system that didn’t understand.  I love the country and CDMX, but I’m doing other things instead.

HOME & HEARTH:  In chronological order….2.5 years ago I started to lose my mind.  Eleven days in the hospital, six-months of recovery, strong drugs…  It is only now that we can talk about this.  I was only much later diagnosed with advanced neurological Lyme Disease.  For weeks, I could do nothing—make my bed, prepare dinner, drive.  I rarely spoke.  I had no appetite and lost far too much weight.  Eight months of antibiotics, six months of herbs, three months of powerful phychotropics.  As the medications began to take effect, I began to leave the house, go for walks, answer emails.  I didn’t drive for six months.  You do not want to get Lyme!!  It’s true—you really do see who your friends are.  It’s also true that mental illness results from things other than “being crazy.”  Lyme threw my serotonin-dopamine level so out of whack, that only time and medications could correct it.  When the brain is damaged, it takes a very long time for it to heal.  When I came through it, though, the strangest thing happened:  I was happier, stronger and better than I’d been in years and it's still that way.  I can truthfully say, this made me a better person, although I would not wish it on anyone.  The human body is still an enigma. Easter 2019 fell on the heels of my full recovery.  The holiday now makes sense.  I truly understand what Resurrection means!  I had “died,” but was returned to life.  For that I will be forever thankful and grateful.

 

No sooner was I better, than Steve fell on ice, broke his leg, had to have surgery and was cooped up for three full months.  In the spring of  2019 I saw the full consequences of a hiking accident I’d had in Maine the preceding summer.  Spinal stenosis is very painful.  What followed was epidural after epidural that finally saw resolution with surgical intervention.  Miracle!

 

On the 9^th anniversary of my mother’s death, in an attempt to put a happier spin on the day, Steve and I approached the subject of marriage once again.  After 41 years, it was time!  On June 21, 2019, in front of 50 dear people in our back yard, the ceremony, led by Carole Hull, almost a sister to me for more than 50 years, performed the most meaningful rite the photographer had ever seen (or so he said when he dropped off the photos.)  We’d successfully passed the “in sickness and health” portion of the chosen traditional vows.  Except for a brief spritzle of rain, a sign seen as many as a heavenly blessing, it was a glorious first day of summer and start of a new life as officially married!  Woohoo!  Joy in Mudville.  Hospitalization and Marriage—Amazing bookends to the 2018-2019 school year.

 

The next day, Steve retired!  Big stuff in two days!

 

That August, we went to Europe: Paris, Switzerland for two weeks, (thanks to our German friends, Herbert and Ursula, who gave us their home in the lovely little village of Ligerz), then to Normandy and Omaha Beach.  It was, at least to both of us, a bit distressing to see people playing on the beach where so many men had met horrific deaths.

 

In November, we drove to Boston, sailed south on the Norwegian Jade and spent 14 days on the Caribbean.  In January, we left for Mexico City together, rented a phenomenal house in the southern part of that beloved metropolis.  Alas and alack, all travel came crashing down when we left in a hurry in late March.  Not wanting to go through NYC, we flew to Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico, crossed into El Paso on foot, rented a car and spent a pleasant week traveling the 2000+ miles home.  We were able to spend a socially distant evening with Bob and Carole Hull in Wichita, KS as well as a lazy Sunday morning driving in and through the exclusive suburb of Ladue, MO.  Finally in New York State, we spent my dreary, cold and wet birthday in Fredonia, where I’d gone to college a gazillion years ago.

 

And so it goes.  We, like the rest of humanity, are all in this together.  This is a global teachable moment, and we all need a respite, I’m so glad the season of hope is upon us.  As Mame said in the classic play by the same name…

 

We need a little Christmas
Right this very minute,
Candles in the window,
Carols at the spinet.
Yes, we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute.

 

It has been so nice to see evidence of Christmas so early this year.  Apparently, many feel the same way.  Merry Christmas comes from the inner most part of our hearts.  May 2021 bring us hope!

 

 

 

 

"First of December"

December 1, 2020

 

Now the first of December was covered with snow
And so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Lord, the Berkshires seemed dreamlike on account of that frosting
With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

 

I find myself a bit blue today.  The pandemic goes on and on.  Death or the fear of death is ever present.  I told Steve the other day that after 43 years together, we have far less time than more.

 

First of December.  I do not know when I started listening to “Sweet Baby James” every December 1^st.  It’s a long time.  The first time I clearly remember is 1990.  Thirty years ago.  We were living in a hotel because of a house fire.  It was a Saturday, cold, and we were on our way to visit a friend in Vermont.  “First of December, covered with snow…”  It was that year.

 

Since retirement, I’ve been to a slew of places on this date.  Eight years ago seeking sanctuary in a quiet park in Varnassi, India.  Agra and the Taj Majal in 1998.  Guatemala, Berlin, Mexico City more than once on this date.  Critically ill two years ago.  I wonder if I even remembered to listen to the song in 2028?  Nothing else mattered.

 

The funk seems to be emanating from a few sources.  With all those wonderful December 1^st behind me in all those wonderful places, how many more years am I going to be able to that?

 

The turn of a year, whether is be marked by December 1^st, the gathering of the greens in late October, Christmas, birthday are not met with as much enthusiasm as I’ve done in the past.  The body is failing itself in small ways.  I cannot do all the things I could do ten years ago.

 

Perhaps it’s COVID.  Perhaps it’s 71.  Perhaps it’s just the reckoning of years that have gone by so rapidly.

 

Perhaps.

Five Decades and the New England 111

Dan Ladue 

ADK 46er #2694

New England 111er #

 

For Michaela

 

Whoever said that life is more about the journey then the destination was thinking of me and my 49 years journey to become a New England 111er.

 

It was 1971, and my friend Michaela and I were a few weeks out of college when I called her to see if she’d like to climb a mountain with me.  It was June 15^th and I was arranging a day off from my college job at a grocery store.  The specifics are lost in memory, but our goal was New York’s Whiteface Mountain.  There are only a handful of details that I do remember from that hike: the trail was wet, we had terrible footwear, black flies and mosquitoes were monstrous, and, thanks to Michaela’s memory, we made snowballs near the summit.

 

What I did not know that day was that it would mark mountain #1 in my quest to become an ADK 46er and, ultimately, a New England 111er.

 

It includes two careers, hiking in four states, countless miles traveling to and from trailheads and equally countless miles on trails in all sorts of weather.  The arc of years spans youth, to middle age to senior.  To compound the challenge were two joint replacements, lower back surgery and advances Lyme Disease.  It has been a journey.

 

In 1972 I must have been a decision to earn the title of “Adirondack 46er.”  A roommate had completed the mountains that summer and his accomplishment motivated me.  Teaching provided great opportunities to explore all sorts of summer activities.  For me they would be hiking and travel.  That summer, over extended trips in the Adirondacks, I knocked off the essential firsts—Cascade and Porter, as well as Giant of the Valley.  That fall, I’d leave school and head to Keene Valley, park my car in the Garden Parking lot (yes, there were spaces in those days,) spend the night in a lean-to and climb both Saturday and Sunday.  One Saturday saw a completion of the Great Range. Once, in late October using a lean-to at Bushnell Falls, several of us made an ascent of Marcy only to find ourselves in a sudden snow squall, improperly dressed and foolish enough or smart enough, depending on one’s point-of-view, to look for the trail and head down. By the good Grace of God, the hike had an uneventful happy ending.  It did, though, hamper any further hikes into the high peaks late in the season.  By the end of the year I was an ADK 11er and well on my way.

 

First love is beautiful and what made it most beautiful was a mutual love for hiking.  In the early to mid 1970’s we’d knock off chunks of mountains on day hikes and on overnighters.  We would spend delightful days camped at Marcy Dam or John’s Brook Lodge, climbing by day and enjoying the company of other hikers in the evening.  Haystack…Blake’s Peak and Colvin…Algonquin.  Beautiful memories of sunny blue days, above-tree line peaks and moonlit nights in an around the High Peaks are vivid reminders of those days.

 

But first loves do not always last, and when it ended so did my hiking.  A new love would enter my life, but this new love did not like to hike.  And so followed a long stretch where almost no climbing was done at all.  The new love introduced me to other things; a return to the mountains waited until 1985, during a sabbatical year from my job as a high school English teacher to study Library Science at SUNY Albany, where I once again returned to the mountains. What followed was an aggressive assault on peaks still unclimbed.  In those days, half the mountains were untrailed.  Someone had given me a 1962 copy of the Guide to the Adirondack Trails which proved to be an invaluable reference source in orienting myself to those illusive summits.  Consider these directions for climbing Allen from the Twin Brook lean-to.  “From the lean-to (0 mi.) continue toward Marcy on the yellow trail until it meets the gravel lumber road heading N and S at 0.29 m.  Turning R this roads heads S…., crosses several brooks flowing from L and comes to a junction with another gravel road at 1.28 m.  (This road to the R heads 250 deg., turns S at two loading stations, then W and SW, finally heading 160 deg. At 2.00 m, crossing Dudley Brook on a bridge at 2.07 mi and joining the main gravel road in the first clearing at 2.14 mi...”  Whew!  Good orienting skills were absolutely essential.

 

On a flawlessly blue, 1^st of October 1989, I finished on Seymour.  “Done at last”” I wrote Grace Hudowlski somewhat uncreatively. “Done at last! Thank God I’m done at last!”  On October 21^st, Grace wrote me a personal, multi-paragraph letter.  “Seymour ‘on a spectacularly gorgeous, sunny, first of October’ must have been incredible.’  It’s an added blessing to have such a day in the mountains although nothing takes away the special feeling one has on his 46^th.  Welcome to Adirondack Forty-Sixer membership.”  What a lady!

 

As was the pattern from the very beginning, there would be long gaps between spurts of hiking.  Thus was the case with New Hampshire.  Perhaps it was the sheer “OMG—there are 48 of them” that kept me away, but once I began, it took less time to finish than either New York or Maine. 

 

My first foray into the Whites was in late August 1995 which started a tradition that went on for several years.  The last week in summer, before my teaching job brought me back to school, was a perfect time to get away, spend a chunk of time off the Kankamangus or in the Franconia Notch area of the White Mountains, and peak-bag my days away until the start of the Labor Day weekend.  More than once I hiked hut to hut, starting on one side of the White Mountains and relying on the kindness of hiking strangers on the other side to bring me back to my car.  My New Hampshire journal records serendipitous encounters with other hikers, our common passion for mountains the linkage that bonded us.  Most of those hikes were done alone, but I did avail myself on some of the more difficult climbs with AMC sponsored hikes.

 

It was during those years that I fell in love with the Presidentials.  If I saw a stretch of particularly good weather, I’d drop whatever plans I had, drive to Twin Mountain, bunk in at my favorite, now non-existent, cabin complex, gather up firewood and enjoy a bonfire before settling in for an early night.  Ridge walking high above tree line on those mountains, always on dazzling mid-summer days, remains one of the highlights of New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

 

Vermont’s peaks were easily accessible from home and were always done when late summer or full peak autumn days were blue and vistas spectacular.  The descent off Mansfield’s Sunset Trail is one of the more memorable hikes as the sun began its slow descent over the Adirondacks and the Lake Champlain Islands.  My hiking journal records Ellen as the last of the five Vermont peaks on a “gorgeous, clear, warm” October 1, 2001.  What made the hike unforgettable, however, was a swim I took in Plattsburgh Bay later that afternoon.  “Snow geese and a swan shared the water with me” I wrote later that evening.  It wasn’t only mountains that made an impression.

 

In August of 2005 it was time to tackle Maine.  That spring/summer had been emotionally demanding.  I’d walked the journey with my oldest friend from her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer in April to her death less than two months later.  I gave the eulogy at her funeral.  I was still emotionally drained two months later, and could not bear to attend the dispersal of her ashes on her birthday later that summer.  On August 24^th, I opted out and chose to climb Old Speck—my first peak in Maine.  Little did I know that Maine would raise the ante on how I viewed hiking.  It would take thirteen years to finish.

 

A year later I retired from my job and, apparently, from hiking as well.  It would take another six years to get back on track.

 

Summer of 2011 saw magical hikes up Abraham and the Saddlebacks.  The climb down a ski trail is the only time I ever saw a moose in all the trips to New Hampshire and Maine. It is more remembered, though, for hiking paths off the summit through entire slopes covered in mountain lupine that reached the top of my head.

 

In mid-September of 2012 I misjudged the time it would take to reach the summit of Crocker Mountain.  I foolishly started too late in the morning for the grueling five-hour hike.  Any plans to do South Crocker ended when I realized that even my fifteen-minute turn-around time was insufficient.  Descending the mountain on that late summer’s day changed the way I viewed Maine’s wilderness.  I’d seen no one all day. Coming down I heard animal noises that were not birds.  People at home, of course, thought it was funny, but I couldn’t get off that mountain fast enough.  I got to my car in almost pitch darkness.  I privately vowed that I’d never do this sort of thing again.

 

Two weeks later I tripped on badly placed curbing in my hometown and broke the patella of my right knee.  It was all downhill from there.  By mid-2013 I had two choices: live with the pain or have the knee replaced.  For me there was only one option.  I wanted my life back and I would do whatever it took to get back into the game.

 

A year later I was ready to climb again, but the combination of the hike off Crocker with its spooky serenade of animal sounds and a skittishness to get really aggressive in the mountains, led me to hire the terrific team of Melissa Shea and Jim Albert of Mountain Guide Services in New Vineyard, Maine.  I was upfront with them, but they took me on as clients.  On a blazing hot September 4^th, a year to the date I’d had my knee replaced, we scored South Crocker.  A day later we tackled the Bigelows.  I was back in the game, but only briefly.  Three years later my other knee was replaced which led to more delays.

 

I once again hired Melissa and Jim.  My goal was North Brother and the Khatadin twins of Baxter and Hamlin in Baxter State Park.  It had only been a year since the second replacement and I was physically unable to finish all three.  Hamlin was a monster of a climb done on the first day of autumn.  Melissa almost called a turn-around but saw how motivated I was to finish.  We ate a quick lunch on the summit, but the descent was slow and by the time we reached the junction of the Chimney Pond and Hamlin Ridge Trail dusk had settled in.  For more than three miles we walked out in the dark, glad to have followed the Park’s requirements that all hikers have a flashlight.

 

I was determined to finish in 2018.  The day for the ascent was perfect—hot and sunny with a stiff wind on the summit to cool us down.  It was the summer of our 40^th anniversary and my partner, who’s idea of a good time is not climbing mountains like Baxter, agreed to come along.  I could not have been happier.  

 

The hike was surprisingly easy, as compared to Hamlin or the Bigelows.  With the exception of the .2 mile stretch up a scree-studded slide, we were at the summit by early afternoon.  At 1:38, on July 10^th, my hands touched the signage atop the mountain.  I was a bit overwhelmed.  It had taken a long, long time to reach this goal.

 

Decades change the way we live…and hike.  When I started on Whiteface Mt. that June day in 1971 I was paying $100.00 a month for a nice one-bedroom apartment.  Ten dollars more got me a garage.  In 2017 the bunkhouse at Roaring Brook Campground in Baxter State Park cost $110.00.  The bunkhouse.  Two nights.  No electricity.  No showers.  In 1971, I borrowed my father’s state-of-the art Kodak Instamatic for the rare time I took snapshots.  On July 10, 2018, when I finished on Baxter, I posted triumphant photographs via Facebook and Whatsapp to friends on five continents.  In 1971, 23 people hiked end to end on the Appalachian Trail.  On an uneventful, eight hour, nine-mile return hike on Spaulding in late August 2017, I counted 24 through-hikers—18 heading north and 6 going south.

 

Times had certainly changed.  

 

But what had not changed, despite mountain and trail congestion at all locations, was the dazzling beauty of our beautiful corner of the world.  Mountain lupine still grace trails; sunsets still sparkle.  The smell of wood smoke to hurtle me back decades.  The sound of a loon on a lake or pond can still send goosebumps up and down my arm.  Our mountains are more than precious.  I know it would be difficult for me to live in a place where the earth didn’t rise to meet the sky or where lakes, ponds and rivers did not exist.

 

A month after I finished, my friend Michaela returned to Plattsburgh.  It was the 50^th anniversary of our friendship.  On our day together we headed to Whiteface, this time driving to the summit.  Unlike that June day in 1971 when our entire future lay ahead of us, we acknowledged how finite time was.  While we had certainly changed, what lay below us had not.  To the west, Lake Placid glistened in the late afternoon sun and to the east lay Vermont’s Green Mountains   Forever wild!  New York led the way in the Northeast.  Let us hope that future generations will enjoy the same that we have come to love.

 

The remarkable trek from Whiteface to Baxter had taken 47 years, 14 days.  It had been an extraordinary, five-decade, long walk in the woods.

 

Epilogue:

 

Two months after completing Baxter, and after a late summer of deepening depression and confusion, I was diagnosed with advanced psychiatric Lyme Disease.  Today, after eleven days in the hospital, ten months of antibiotics and six months of herbs, there is still a residue of Lyme in my body, but I am in full remission.  I lost almost a year of my life. Please take Lyme Disease seriously. 

 

 

 

 

 

Fredonia Birthday

March 30, 2020

Fredonia, New York

The last time I was in Fredonia for my birthday was 48 years ago today.  I was 20 and a Junior in college.  I was innocent and green and still a very young man.  There was no way, of course, to know what wonders the world and life would unfold in all the years that followed.

My friend “Susie two-shoes” called and asked me if I’d like to go out for dinner to celebrate.  Why on earth would a human being be called “Susie two-shoes?”  Her name was Susan, she was from Long Island, was a year younger than I, and once I graduated, she slipped off the radar for the rest of my life.  Wherever she is, she’ll be 70 to my 71.

I am in Fredonia by choice, although somewhat accidentally.  I was supposed to be in Trujillo, Peru, but the COVID-19 virus has disrupted everyone’s plans all over the world.  Instead of Peru, we felt we had to escape  Mexico City where we’ve been all winter.  We flew to Ciudad Juarez last Wednesday, crossed the border, picked up a car in El Paso and have been driving eastward ever since.  If we have to come home, we might as well make some lemonade out of the trip and see a few things along the road.  And one of them is timing the trip home to be in Fredonia by late afternoon.

It has been a day of nostalgia.  The car was Wazed to Mayville, New York, where I student taught at Mayville High School so many years ago.  I have thanked God all my life that I had a wonderful, compassionate, creative, excellent teacher to work under.  Merrill Clute.  Many years ago I visited the school, learned he had gone back to newspaper reporting, got his work address and was at least able to tell him how grateful I was to work under him.  Great gifts that we only realize how truly big they were until much later in life.

The day was cold and wet and drizzly.  I was still wearing shorts because I refuse to change into jeans, denying the fact that we had to leave Mexico City because of the virus.  It was no day to see the campus which was a lovely as I remembered it.  By the end of the cold walk, I was melancholy and sad, thinking of how many years had actually passed since I’d left the campus as a recent graduate 50 years ago.  A half a century! Time moves on whether we want it to or not.

Fredonia.  I grew so much there.  I was far from home and no one expected me back to Plattsburgh except for the big 2: Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I lived with a wonderful bunch of guys for two years on the second floor at 25 Day Street.  Mrs. Mary Epolitio was our landlady and how she ever put up with us still mystifies me.  She was in her 80’s, had survived both World Wars and the Great Depression.  She had a gracious heart and every year, on March 19^th, the Feast of St. Joseph, she’d bring up a big dish of pasta for us.  I still remember her with great fondness.

She charged each of us $100.00 a semester.  I slept on a mattress on the floor in my own room, listened to music from my first stereo system and was happier than I’d ever been in my life.  It was a time in my life when I grew into myself, when I finally took off as a student and when emotional growth spurts were greater than probably any other time in my life.  I did not know how cook or eat properly, and I put on a horrible amount of weight, but in the last semester of my final year I dropped 55 pounds and took up long distance running and swimming.  You can only do that if life is good.

71!  Could I ever have imagined that number on March 30, 1970?  My father said on his 80^th birthday, “I’ve had a good life,” and I can say that now.  What a wonderful life it’s been.  Career, love, health and sufficient money to life the classic American middleclass dream.  I am beyond grateful.

We do not know what this virus has in store for any of us.  I think this is why I look upon New Year’s Ever with trepidation.  The last few years have been a challenge and if I’d known the bad times were coming on December 31^st, I think I would have lived in fear until they really did occur.  But the good news is that all the battles were overcome, for both of us, and life is good once again.

No, I am not 20.  I can no longer long-distance run, ski or do many of the things as well as I could when I was that young.  But I can still walk, and climb mountains, and navigate far-flung countries.  We must always view life on the side of what we can do and not on what we can’t.

So here I am in Fredonia.  Dan Ladue.  Class of 1971.  One year from his 50^th anniversary of his college graduation, an event he will not attend.  Simply to walk the village in this time of lockdown, when few people are outdoors, to revisit the campus and to see in my mind’s eye the boy who first came to this village and the friends he made is gift enough.

Happy birthday, me!

Turning 70

Turning 70 

This morning, at 8:45 am, I slipped into the eighth decade of my life.  That is not a fact that makes me happy.  Grateful, yes, but happy, no.  I have turned 70 and that’s incredibly hard to say in public, let alone acknowledge to myself. 

I was born March 30, 1949 and on that day a star danced especially for me. From the beginning, I was positioned in a place of privilege.  Early on in life, I became aware that my whiteness, my maleness, my education and my financial comfort, to mention but a few, put me at an advantage in the world.  In these 70 years I didn’t die from an infectious disease, I didn’t die in a car accident and I didn’t die “suddenly” of some freak illness or a heart attack. How many I know who didn’t get out of their teens, their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s or 50’s, 60’s?  How grateful I am.

l look around and wonder how I got here, landed on some foreign shore that once seemed impossibly distant.  So now I have just crossed into a decade that, by most standards, defines me as “old.”  Despite the angst, turning 70 has been one of the easiest things I’ve ever done.  I simply showed up.  I drew breath, exercised, ate well, had a long and satisfying career and bam, here I am—a newly minted septuagenarian.

On this birthday, more than any other, I feel as if I’m standing on a mountain top, at whose foot the ocean of eternity is audibly rushing; below me, life moves on--life with its deserts and flower gardens, its sunny days and its stormy days, all spread out green, wild and beautiful.  Age is not measured by years.  Some people are born old and tired, while others of us are still going strong well past the cusp of youth and even middle age. Contrary to what some people say, seventy is not the new 50.  It’s 70!

I will heed Alexander Pope’s advice: “Pleas'd to look forward, pleas'd to look behind, and count each birthday with a grateful mind.

Ten years ago, at 60, I wrote that 60 was a good age, free of the ravages of old age.  It certainly was a decade where things were relatively tranquil.  I recently made a list to help me reflect on the notable things—both good and bad—that shaped my 60’s.

I have lost my mother and brother within three years of each other. I have financial security, good health and enough time to do the things that are still on my never-ending bucket list of life.  Both knees were replaced during this decade thus allowing me to resume hiking and walking.  Minus some parts, I’m still moving forward, intact.  I am grateful to live in a time when these things can be done.

I have learned a second language, did long term substitution jobs teaching it, spent two winters traveling in South America and eight winters living in Mexico City where I worked with two refugee centers and helped developed their libraries. Often, I lived solely in Spanish. There were challenges and triumphs.   

I’ve learned that the words “I love you” and “I’m sorry” can never be said enough, in whatever language. I made new friends around the globe, lost some as well and I have realized that those who left me were never friends to begin with. I have enriched friends and they enriched me.  

I’ve learned that listening to my heart is as important as listening to my head, because ignoring either leads to dangerous decision making. I’ve learned that questions are often more valuable than answers, and that when the questioning stops, life in some important measure ends, even though I’m still breathing.

I’ve learned to listen more and talk less. I’ve learned that life is basically less about having then about doing and being.  I’ve learned to listen to the different voices that guide me at this juncture of life, and I’ve learned that these deeper voices will sound like risk, surrender, trust, destiny and love.  I’ve learned to be kind, even to the most miserable person, because one never knows what one is going through at that moment.  I’ve learned that these voices of an intimate stranger that’s from somewhere else is the still, small voice of God that Elijah slowly learned to hear.

The second half of life asks us, and ultimately requires of us, relinquishment. Relinquishment of identification with property and role status. It is time to embrace inwardly confirmed values.  The second half of life presents us with the time and space for personal development. I am never going to have greater powers of choice. I am never going to possess more emotional resistance, more insight, into what works for me and what doesn’t.  Jung’s most compelling contribution was the idea of individuation--the lifelong project of becoming more clearly the whole person that God intended us to be.  This is the time to reexamine life and make necessary changes as well as experiencing the quiet joy of life in relationship to the soul.  

A closer-than-desired brush with death at 69 forced me to face my own mortality.  The outpouring of love around me allowed me to see the Incarnation of God in their compassion.  I learned to listen to the messages in my body, to slow down, to live in the precious moment of now.  I learned that to be is a blessing and that just to live is a holy act.  I am a better, happier and stronger man than I before the incident and more appreciative of every day.  Not a bad lesson to learn at the cusp of a new decade.

There is still much to do and achieve.  If the agenda of the first half of life is social, meeting the demands and expectations society asks of us--establishing friendships, finding one’s place in the world and establishing a career--then the questions of the second half of life are spiritual, addressing the larger issue of meaning.  Our belief system at this juncture of life is finally not a moral matter; it’s a mystical matter.

I’ll be 70 for a full year and in my seventies for a lengthy ten years.  That means I’ll have to adjust my expectations.  To know how to age well is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most challenging chapters in the great art of living.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve skied my last black diamond off the summit of Whiteface.  It’s doubtful that I’ll buy another necktie or suit. The long-ago bucket-list of hiking the Appalachian Trail no longer holds the same appeal it once did.

Even though my body has been betraying itself for some time, so have stamina, capacity and resilience. I can no longer multitask.  I need more time to do things, more time between everyday responsibilities and more time to recover.  It’s been a humbling experience.  I now have a front-row seat to the spectacle of my own deterioration.

Still, I’m grateful for so very much. I will be hopeful, cheerful and reverent. I will continue to blow out candles, play, nap, go to the gym, volunteer, and binge. I will continue to dream, dare, imagine, push my limits, wonder, forgive friends and do more than I think I can.  I’ve never given up, or used the word “can’t,” and I’m not going to begin now.  

At this point I’m perfectly comfortable walking in mystery and paradox. I will travel and Travel Big!  Not only will I continue living in Mexico, now’s the time for the Silk Route from Istanbul to Delhi, to travel from Johannesburg to Nairobi, and to enjoy longer cruises. Big Trips, multi days.  “Old men should be explorers” T. S. Elliot said, and I intend to follow his advice.

Most of all I will celebrate myself and express thanks to the God who has maintained me for all these years.  

This new decade of my life will hold interesting challenges, joys and sorrows.  I know the fragility ahead, but I also know that I am privileged to gain membership in the three score and ten club.

Happy birthday to me!

Dan Ladue

March 30, 2019

People Remembered: Margaret Ladue Kennedy

My Aunt Margaret was my father’s youngest sister.  Unlike my dad and his middle sister who started life on a farm in Beekmantown, Margaret’s memories only existed in the city of Plattsburgh.  Her reference points were quite different than that of her two other siblings. She was, to the month, exactly thirty years my senior. Had she lived, she’d have turned 100 on March 12, 2019.  She died young—younger then than her children and nephews are today.  She was only 67.

As a family, we did not seem to be as close to Margert and her husband, Jim, as we were with my dad’s middle sister, Catherine.  Their son, John, was an only child and I was often included in their family outings. None of that happened on the Kennedy side of the family.  We never spent holidays with them no did we do anything with them.  I’m sure my father had an intimate relationship with his sister, but my brother and I, and our mother, seemed to have a rather distant relationship with them.

My earliest memories of my aunt is of her sitting at the kitchen table in the back of the house.  She always seemed to be nursing a bottle of Topper beer and smoking a cigarette.  Did she do this every day?  I just don’t know.

What I do know is that the aunt I remember in the last decade of her life is one who’d been transformed.  I was still a new teacher when she had her hip replaced.  Surgery for that was still relatively new.  1974? The date seems right to me.  In my memory, she’d always led a very sedentary life—up to the point of surgery.  After weeks of physical therapy to gain back mobility, she just continued what she’d already started.  Gone was the sedentary aunt I knew.  She now swam, walked and exercised on a regular basis.  She lost weight; she gave up smoking and drinking and became a new woman.

Her husband, my Uncle Jim, retired and, like all Ladue’s before her, relocated to Florida for the winter months.  They’d leave early—long before Thanksgiving—but would return home by early March.  I never could figure that out.  But her birthday was mid-month and she told me several times that she liked being home to watch spring emerge.

In September of 1985, my parents were celebrating their 40^th wedding anniversary.  I’d planned a big party for them for the actual date of the anniversary.  I was on sabbatical studying at SUNY Albany.  Logistics were important.  My mom called to tell me that something had happened to Margaret that triggered a diagnosis of brain cancer.  The Prognosis was grim, and she was essentially given a death sentence.  For the moment, however, she was OK.  I got on the phone, called the relatives and a decision was made to move the date up a week, thus allowing her and my uncle to come while she was still in good health.

The following week a small miracle occurred.  She was offered a new protocol, some new treatment, that was still experimental.  She agreed to try the new drug; within in days she noticed a positive difference.  She’d bene returned to life.  She and my uncle were given the gift  of another winter in Florida, but by spring she began to fail again.

I graduated, Steve finished his semester at Laval University, we were homeless and could not get into our home until August, so we went to Europe for three months.  On a gorgeous summer’s day on an island in Greece, on a day when we’d rented motor scooters, my Aunt Margaret died.

We didn’t learn about this until we returned home.  My dad was devastated.  His youngest sister was dead at 67.

New York City. Circa 1960.

New York City.  Circa 1960.  A distant memory.  My mother wakes me at 11:00 pm.  I dress and she drives my father and me to the train station where we board the midnight train to Manhattan.  My father still works for the D & H so he knows everyone in the Pullman car.  We settle in.  And I sleep ‘til dawn when Dad wakes me.  We have arrived.

There is always a ritual to these arrivals.  We cross the street from Grand Central Station and have breakfast at Horn and Hardett’s.  I survey the food choices.  Too many!  I slip nickels and dimes into the automated food slots and out comes breakfast. 

We are in New York to visit my Aunt Sheila.  Somehow, probably by Subway, we get to Rego Park.  I do not know how long we stay.  It could only be for the weekend.  Aunt Sheila always has small bottles of Coke and serves delicious greasy bacon with eggs for breakfast.  Her home has a faint smell of camphor.  My bedroom is the room her son, my godfather, grew up in.  On the walls are photos from high school and the awards he was given.  I can always feel her pride.

In previous visits, my father had arranged tickets to see a live Radio broadcast.  I have a faint, dim remembrance of siting very close to the stage and being asked a question I could not answer.  We seemed to be in the front row.  Another time we were in the audience of a live taping of the Howdy Doodie show and yet again for some early TV variety show before the years when all of this was transported to Los Angeles.  It all seems so very long ago.

On our visits to the City, my Dad would bring me to Macy’s and let me ride the wooden escalators from street level to the top floor then down again.  Afterwards, we’d cross the street in eat at Tad’s Steak House.

In high school, my aunt gave me specific directions on how to get to and from Rego Park to the City on the Subway.  The only stipulation was that I be back in time for dinner.  I was 16, or younger, and alone in the City.  I’d play a game that gives me the shivers today, but probably established my fearlessness in travel.  I’d arrive at Grand Central, pick a metro line, select a station, ride to it, get out, walk around, then return to where I’d started.  I wandered around neighborhoods I probably should not have been in.  I was fearless, yet cautious, and somehow knew my limits.  I always got back to Grand Central and I made sure I never told anyone.

With my limited funds, I’d go to a Broadways ticket box office and buy a balcony or Standing Room only ticket.  For $5.00 I was seeing my first shows at Wednesday matinees.  (Just yesterday, I paid $108.00, 40% off, to see a show.  But maybe those $5.00 was equal to the $108.00 today.  Life’s changes.)  Sometimes I’d buy a ticket to Radio City Music Hall where I’d see a movie than a live Rockette’s show.  A long time ago in a very different New York.

Such beautiful memories.

Many years later, after my father’s death, I found myself in New York in early November.  I could feel my father’s presence.  I scrapped any plans I had and decided to make a pilgrimage to my father. I went to Macy’s, rode the escalators, had lunch at Tad’s, returned to Grand Central and paid homage to the ghost of the automat that had stood across the street. In the end, it was a happy visit.  New York, my Dad and me.   Then and now.

New York would dominate my urban life for years.  When I needed to be in a city, it was always New York to which I’d travel.  Expect for a brief period in the late 1970’s after I’d been mugged, I’d return often to “The City.”  Each March, somewhere around my birthday, I’d splurge on three theater tickets.  My birthday bash/theater binge.  I stopped doing that the year I drove through nightmarish snow to get home.

There are only glimpses of the New York I remember as a youngster and young man.  It is so much cleaner now.  42^nd Street is only a specter of the street I’d wander down as a young man.  Looking back on it, a teen ager should never have walked into the shops I’d investigate in those days.  Horn and Hardett’s is long gone.  Tad’s still has a presence but not in the low 30’s where my dad and I ate.  All the porn shops are shuttered.  In their place are restored theaters and trendy tourist shops.  It’s returned to the 42^nd Street of my parents’ generation and it’s all for the better.

I feel very old lately.  No longer young, on the cusp of old.  It’s a sobering feeling.  Looking at the hordes of young people who still gravitate to the City, I see myself.  It still lures people in and probably always will.

New York.  Seven decades of memories.

New York