I was admittedly a little nervous about my journey to Spain for what I dubbed the “Baby Camino.” (And, I had the feeling everyone else was a lot nervous.)

If you have never heard of the Camino, I ask that you google Camino de Santiago. It’s a famous pilgrimage that folks have been doing for over a millennium. I chose the simplest version of it – the last one hundred kilometers.

Two months before I left, with all my supplies ready, and many miles of training under my belt, I would mention the Camino to hubby, and he would inevitably say, “You’re serious about this?”

I wasn’t offended. I’m typically not very gung-ho about travel and haven’t ventured out alone in years. What’s more, the last time we traveled to Europe, I forgot to leave airplane mode on. We are still trying to figure out how we avoided thousands of dollars in cell phone fees.

During a visit last year, hubby’s cousin from Germany mentioned that his wife wanted to do the Camino. Hubby’s eyes immediately met mine because he knew this was something I’d been talking about for years. (And he has said more than once that he isn’t interested in going on vacation to walk. I get it. Not many are.)

I’m not really certain what put the Camino in my heart, but last December the dream was hatched to meet my two fellow pilgrims from Germany in Vigo, Spain at the end of September 2025, to walk to Santiago de Compostela.

To be continued…

Recently I was having Sunday brunch with family at a popular little place in the more upscale part of our county.

I just happened to be looking out the window at the tables outside, two of which were recently vacated, but not cleared. This is the type of place where they give you the pot when you order coffee.

The place was pretty crowded and there were many people milling around out there waiting for a table. I watched as a guy walked up to the table, poured coffee into one of the used cups and sat down to drink it. He moved to the other table still drinking his coffee and then he got up, dropped off the coffee cup and picked up a half eaten sandwich.

When I shared what I was witnessing, my brother told a story of how back in school he once saw a kid take food that was left on top of the trash in the lunchroom. It made me glad it was my sensitive brother that witnessed this and not another kid who may have ridiculed him. My brother said it made him think that although we had some pretty “lean” years growing up, we never went hungry. Oh, there were days when a Devil Dog was all there was for dinner, but we always try to see the humorous side when talking about those years. That said, I’d pretty much kill to be that weight and be able to eat Devil Dogs for dinner now.

At the risk of stereotyping, the guy in the restaurant did not look particularly homeless. Maybe he had mental problems, or an addiction, or maybe he was just hungry, but I’m still thinking about him and feeling grateful for how our lives turned out.

When the doorbell rings in the middle of the day, I can be fairly certain it’s a neighbor needing assistance with something – often technology based. I really don’t mind this as I read that a fulfilling retirement should consist of a third of your time spent with family, a third spent on community, and a third spent on yourself. I chalk the neighbors up to community.

Often, it’s cell phone related (“I usually mash this button, but that’s not working”); or help needed with something like a digital frame (“My grandchild sent this and I’m not sure what the heck I’m supposed to do with it”); or perhaps it’s the always popular, “I may have ordered something on the phone/computer by accident” situation.

I’ve even encountered the unbelievable, “Can you help me? I think I threw out my savings bonds.” (Spoiler Alert: She did, and there’s actually a U.S. Treasury Department process for it.)

Recently though, the request was for help with for an upcoming cruise. It was too early to check in so I told them I would try in a day or two and get back to them.

After checking them in as much as I could I headed to their house to get the rest of their information. Their air conditioning had gone out overnight, so they were in a little bit of a tizzy. As I stood in their hot kitchen listening to them yell at one another about where the (expired) passports were, and how they had trouble with the name on the birth certificate last time, and just about everything else one can imagine, I ran out the door, saying, “No worries, I’ll come back.”

A little later the husband brought over the paperwork. On his way out, he said, “I better get back and apologize to my wife for yelling at her.”

“Aww,” I said. “Blame the heat.”

“She’ll say, ‘What was your excuse yesterday?’”

“Oh, sorry.”

“I don’t know what it is anymore,” he said. “She could say hello and it aggravates the hell out of me. The doctor says it’s normal at our age, but if it gets any worse, there’s a pill he can give me.”

Who knew they had a pill for that?

Besides helping our “community,” my secret hope is that all the assistance hubby and I provide is being stockpiled as “goodwill” or “karma” that will come back to us someday. Hopefully, we never need that grouchy pill, but maybe we’ll have kind neighbors that will help us if we do.

It’s unbelievable to me that I’m still talking about a crazy shark tale from fifty years ago, but apparently, Jaws made a big impression on me. Not only was the movie the first drive-in I ever drove to, but the book by Peter Benchley was the one that got me hooked on reading.

It’s also unbelievable for me to think that I literally did not read an entire book until I read Jaws at sixteen years old. I have Dear ole Dad to thank for that enlightenment.

My father was one of the thousands of dads who schlepped out from Long Island into New York City for work in the 1970s. And, like most of them, Dad took the Long Island Railroad (LIRR).

There were many rituals to riding the LIRR. Like, don’t touch the big piece of cardboard shoved between the seats and window in car so and so, as the same group of four uses it every morning when they lay it across their laps (two riding backwards, so they face one other), to play cards. And, when you finish a newspaper or paperback, do feel free to leave it on the seat for a fellow commuter.

This is how I got to read Jaws. Dad picked it up on the LIRR; and, when he was done, he left it lying on a table at home, carrying on the railroad’s pseudo library lending system.

I’m sure it was the intriguing photo on the cover that piqued my unmotivated, teenage interest, as I devoured the book, couldn’t wait to see the movie, and forever after was a voracious reader.

Thanks, Dad!

I am not big on rewatching movies, and I really don’t like sequels (unlike Dad who famously said, “The higher the number, the better the movie.”) So, I have not seen Jaws since that warm June night when I drove a bunch of us in my mother’s station wagon to the local drive-In.

Fortunately, I have a cinephile niece who was willing to join me for the re-release of 1975’s summer blockbuster (and, apparently, the movie that created the word “blockbuster”). It was better than I even remembered, and that opening scene – chillingly and skillfully achieved with no blood, and no shark – is still one of the most vivid movie memories for me and still has me talking about it all these years later.

It was some time in the early 90s while working at the Kennedy Space Center that I heard a bunch of commotion coming out of the engineering office. When I went to see what the excitement was, one of them said, “It’s the World Wide Web!”

Needless to say, I didn’t quite understand the magnitude of this statement, but the irony is not lost on me that although I was part of the generation that was on the forefront of this technology, I sometimes still need help getting on Hulu.

A favorite memory of that era has me as one of the first in our group to use a newfangled gadget called the “Mouse.” Up until then, every single command on every computer we were using required keystrokes to do even the simplest task.

I was asked to teach a visiting scientist from Sweden how to use this new gadget. He and I sat shoulder to shoulder in my tiny cubicle staring at the image on my flickering monitor.

“First, you click here,” I said as I dragged the Mouse across the mouse pad, “And then you click there.”

He put his hand on my arm and looked at me quizzically, saying, “What means click?”

Yet, after taking courses in advanced FORTRAN, COBOL and Assembler — the computer languages that ran those computers — I sometimes still have to enlist the help of a family member to stop our Alexa from flashing yellow.

I really don’t mind being part of the old school generation who just may have forgotten more about computers than most folks will ever know about them.

And, I kind of love the fact that at my recent high school reunion hardly anyone had their nose buried in their cell phone. Everyone was simply enjoying connecting with each other, in person, old school style.

I recently had our pool water tested.

“Your acid level is high,” the lady behind the counter said after running the water through the mad scientist looking contraption they use at the pool place.

“I wouldn’t let anyone swim until you get that under control,” she said.

“I swam this morning,” I told her.

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at me with a scrunched up “sucks for you” face.

When I told hubby the story, I said, “So, if I wake up dead tomorrow, you know why.”

No response. He famously doesn’t give much credence to the water testing process of these places.

Later that day, he came out of the bathroom waving a bloody Q-tip.

“Either I have a cut somewhere in my ear, or I’m dying,” he said.

“You can’t be dying,” I said. “I told you I may be waking up dead tomorrow.”

He looked at me with his “I am married to a crazy woman” expression.

“They’ll never know what happened to us,” I said. “It’ll be another Gene Hackman and his wife situation all over again.”

This launched us into a crazy dialog about forensics.

“They’ll figure it out,” he said. “They’ll find the printout from the pool place, and then they’ll see the bloody Q-tip in the trash.”

“Besides,” he said. “Your brother has seen every episode of Forensics Files at least fifty times, this will be a piece of cake.”

“Okay, then,” I said, ironically satisfied.

I’m not gonna lie. It was more like, “Thank God we’ll never pass this way again.”

Just saying.

Recently, a fellow student posted elementary school class pictures of my classmates. These adorable “mini me” photos made me realize that most of the kids in my class had been together almost their entire lives, which made me a little jealous. But if I had been one of them, I probably wouldn’t have bonded with my BFFs and fellow “outsiders” who were also uprooted at fourteen to a new town. Meeting them made the experience – maybe not the thing of wistful 70s songs, but – so much better than it could have been.

Congratulations to my fellow graduates of Newfield’s 1975 class on this momentous anniversary we share with a sobering list of events that put this time lapse into perspective: the movie Jaws; the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (the wreck, not the song); the birth of Saturday Night Live; and the official end of the Vietnam War.

And special thanks to my favorite girls who made this celebratory weekend so memorable and fun, and who always “make me feel like I’m more than a friend.”

I remember thinking in my twenties when a coworker was going to her 50^th high school reunion: Damn, she’s old!

What goes around…

Postscript:
Seeing my fellow high school classmates in their elementary school class photos made me check online to see if I could find any of mine.

Hint: Those are my chubby cheeks in the second row. 

It took a while before we finally received an Amazon box the right size to fit George’s leg.

It had been sitting in the garage since he passed. It was in the house, but it was too sad a reminder of the loss of our friend.

Always the recycler, I found a place online that took used prosthetics for someone in need.

I took the box and the provided label to the UPS counter and asked for assistance. The guy at the counter shook the box a little and could tell there was not enough packing. When he opened the box, he looked at me.

“It’s a leg,” I said. He just nodded and stuffed some brown paper along the sides. It made me think, this guy has seen everything.

“What do I owe you?” I asked.

“I’m supposed to charge for the packaging, but don’t worry about it,” he said.

George would have turned 78 today. I’ve wanted to write about him since his passing in March, but I promised that my blog would be brief, and I don’t think I could ever be brief about George.

The recent (and very good!) Barbara Walters documentary reminded me of a world event that coincided with a personal crisis causing me to miss out on a once in a lifetime opportunity. The upside: It also left me with a very funny memory.

It was March 1979, when I found myself with a mysterious illness that would later be diagnosed as the auto immune disease, Sarcoidosis. I would fully recover with no serious long-term effects, but at the time it was shocking and scary.

I was working for the Secret Service as a seemingly healthy twenty-one-year-old when I was plagued by a weird array of symptoms. After seeing the White House physician, I was sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

This just happened to be the same time as the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty between President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel.

Our Special Agent in Charge knew how interested I was in the historic event and had arranged for a coworker and me to attend the ceremony on the White House lawn. Only now I would miss it.

On the day of the ceremony a corpsman wheeled a television set onto the ward and set it up next to my bed. The nurse asked, “What’s going on?”

“The White House ordered it,” the corpsman said. “So she could watch the signing of the peace treaty.”

The nurse turned to me and said, “Who are you?!”

Little did I know that the White House physician had been calling to check on my status, so there was already a curiosity surrounding the young patient claiming to be a clerk for the U.S. Secret Service.