Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?
I’ve been around the world, to most of the continents. It was for both business and pleasure. I’ve stayed in the finest hotels and some dumps. I’ve eaten with the best chefs and at a choke and puke.
I don’t want to do that anymore. The sense of adventure isn’t enough to make me want to fight the people, the waits, the lines, and the crappy service.
The answer now is that I want to be Home or my place in the mountains. I have my stuff in my place and I don’t have to fight airports, and security lines, stay in places that aren’t mine and someone full of germs was just there before me.
It’s because I’m an introvert and getting old. I don’t care anymore. I don’t have to see everything and right now, there’s nothing I want more than to be in my place, preferably alone with my dog.
Delusions of Adequacy 
The sea . . . with all its power and awe and beauty, its variety ranging from the phosphorescent brilliance in the ship’s wake to the splendor of color at tropical sunset when a volcano has saturated the region with airborne dust. Gigantic thunderstorm to rinse off the stack gas. Mother Nature at her finest.
Gentle rolls to put you to sleep and giant swells to put anxiety in your head. Ice floes and guys building a snowman on the foc’sl. Night sky undimmed by manufactured light and smog. Daredevil dolphins playing tag with the ship’s mustache. No fones. No TV. No distractions.
Ashore, prob’ly Bangkok WAY back in the 60s before the R & R money from ‘Nam screwed it all up. Beautiful place. Pleasant people. Good food. Reasonable prices for souvenirs. I was fortunate to see it before combat-pay inflation jacked up the cost of a taxi from a dollar for a whole day to 2 bucks from one bar to another.
Superb temples, columns, facades, canals. And no beggars, no hookers, no pickpockets, no thugs. Went back a few years later and it was as bad as Tondo in Manila, or Hong Kong, or Tijuana. Still got the memories, tho, and those grunts with their pockets fulla money couldn’t take ‘em away from me.
Also went back to my old home town for my high-school 50-year reunion. VERY disappointing. Wrote a li’l poem about the visit and sent it to the organizing committee when they asked us if we wanted another one in a few years:
Life’s Progress:
Sweet, Salt, Bitter, Fat
From far-flung concerns in diverse distant places,
We go back to peer at those old childhood faces
With questions about what Ma Nature has done
In the last 50 years while we made our own run.
And we hope we will drink from the aged old roots
Of the vines whence we came when we all were just youths,
Let that bittersweet liqueur now smooth and sublime
Lift and transport us back to a magical time.
But those girls that I knew as all svelte and willowy
Now seem to be more like all soft and pillowy,
Not as I remember – all taut and real purdy,
Many of them are now more like all stretched and sturdy.
And I noticed their voices seem quite a bit lower
And all of us have to move quite a bit slower,
And most of the guys and a lot of the chicks
Are now smuggling melons, among their new tricks.
Yes, the rinds are all wrinkled and darkened in spots
While the insides of many seem tied up in knots
With their sweetness diluted by gastric distress
And those bald spots part hidden without much success.
I saw dozens of fully inflated spare tires,
And I listened to more than a few slick-tongued liars
While amazed at how straight were the teeth in some grins
And how odd to see far fewer noses than chins.
Oh – that dreamboat who brought sleep on so many nights?
Well, she’s still captivating with twinkling eyes,
But I’ve learned that although she may have had “it,”
There’s three guys who got sick and tired of her shit.
So today I came home to my own happy life,
To my house and my dog and my beautiful wife . . .
Leaving all my old friends with their pains and their cares,
And I give thanks for some of those unanswered prayers.
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well done
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