Category: travel

miracle medicine

Although my eye feels better, my body has not been filled with light lately. An emotional healing process and all the pressures of daily modern life had taken their toll. As I set off on my walk, with Spiritualized’s muted, beautiful, new album on my headphones, it started to rain. I was planning a six-mile walk, and this was no way to begin. But I pulled up my hoodie, kept my had down, and after a few short minutes, the skies began to clear just enough, and I could see streaks of sun behind the grey clouds. I actually took my headphones off so I could hear the birds singing. Sometimes one walk can change everything. I am reminded this morning of a brochure I picked up in he lobby of the Adventist hospital where my son was born almost eight years ago. It was called “Walking: The Miracle Medicine.” It advocated walking as the best form of exercise, as well as a vegetarian diet, and abstaining from smoking, alcohol, and caffeine. There was a religious message as well, and although I do remember the word “God” used a few times, I can’t say the message was overly preachy. This small tract basically advocated living a pure life, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. I don’t know where that little pamphlet is today (I managed to keep it for at least a few years) but I am always reminded of its message whenever I go for a walk. Walking isn’t just good for the body. It’s good for the spirit. On a walk, you can let you mind off its leash. I started a book today called Eat Sleep Sit by Kaoru Nonomura. It’s about the author’s yearlong experience training as a Zen Buddhist monk at Japan’s most rigorous Zen temple, Eiheiji. founded by Dogen in the 13th century. His experience begins with a walk to the temple gates. After a meal and a night’s sleep, “I turned and looked back. Yes-that was where I’d stood so long the previous day…In the end I’d shed my sandals and crossed the threshold. The place was the same as yesterday, but I myself was changed. During the single night I’d spent behind that door, everything that had made me me had disappeared.” The person that leaves the house in the morning with raindrops falling on her head is not the same person that returns to the house two hours later with sunshine on her face. Likewise, the person that goes to sleep at night is not the same person that wakes up in the morning . This process continues our entire life. In fact, it is our entire life. Thankfully.

satori in Ithaca

When I started my college career at Ithaca College back in 1985, a miracle happened my first night there. I went to the pub in the student union with a kid from New York City who I had just met. He advised me to order a toasted bagel with cream cheese and tomato. I had never had such an exotic dish before. I was from upstate New York, and in the mid-eighties the bagel boom hadn’t happened yet. So I took his advice, and ordered. Then I ate it, and my world was rocked. Something so pure, I thought, must have existed at the creation of the world. Maybe it had. For lunch today, I made this again and was reminded of that night almost 30 years ago. I realized that with three basic ingredients, and the application of a little radiant heat, this simple meal is always available  to me. Then, when I started thinking of Ithaca, I was also reminded of the girl I fell in love with who tried to teach me that nothing went better with your morning coffee that a freshly lit Camel Light. But that’s another story.

big red van

Andrew Walsh, the producer and co-host of my favorite podcast Too Beautiful To Live, has been on a quest lately to retrieve some lost childhood memories in the guise of four free cassette tapes that McDonald’s gave away in the summer of 1986. You can read about his search and his success in finding most of these tapes here. You can also get exact track listings and download the MP3s, which I just did today and burned to a CD for some most excellent summer cruising music. But Andrew’s journey reminded me of the music of my own youthful summers past, and I grew nostalgic. Here’s a story.

When I was a kid growing up in Syracuse, New York in the mid-eighties, my uncle bought a small camp on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack region of New York State. Every summer he would load up my cousins, my sister, myself (and a few other adults for backup) into his big red Chevy van and we would drive north into the woods to spend a week or more swimming, hiking, canoeing, and trying not to get eaten by black bears or bitten to death by black flies. He would also advise us to avoid what he called “crotch rot” by making sure we changed out of our wet bathing suits as soon as we were done swimming in the lake. Maybe this had something to do with acid rain. I’m not sure.  But it was an idyllic time. Occasionally we would take trips into the booming metropolis of Old Forge to visit the hardware store, pick up some Archie comic books or eat some soft-serve. The thing I remember most about those trip to camp, however, was the music we played in the red van on the way up and back. As I remember it, my uncle only had three or four 8-track cassette tapes for the van’s sound system. They were, in the order in which they were most frequently played: Eagles Greatest Hits, Fleetwood Mac Rumors, Elton John’s Greatest Hits, and an album by Linda Ronstadt. There may have been some Santana thrown into the mix as well. So now whenever I hear any of these artists I think back to summers past. And I smile. And I’m thankful I never got crotch rot, although I was chased by a black bear once. Which may have led to something else crotch-related, but that’s another story.