Looking back

Two weeks in England and France led to many memorable sights.  A thing that struck me on a walk along the Thames was this memorial to lost submariners of both world wars, a poignant sculpture of Brits calmly accepting the cost of violent encounters under the sea as water demons tear their vessel's metal skin apart to transport them to the next world in the next instant, as befits careholders of the Empire.

Tracing the footprints of heroes on Omaha Beach was a poignant moment.  Seeing the other four D-Day beaches in Normandy made me ruminate on the brave American, British and Canadian young men who came to grapple with and ultimately throttle the Nazi scourge occupying Europe at the time.

Oxford was charming, and very hoary.  A town full of future leaders of the world.

Paris.  That one word says it all.

Paris

An  American in Paris.  That is what I was, not speaking the language, no guide books in hand, my friends having returned to America after showing me so much of both England and France so graciously, since I had never been overseas before.

The Arc de Triumph, the Left Bank and the Eiffel Tower were what I knew of Paris, and we drove by the Arc de Triumph on our way in, saw the Eiffel Tower from a bridge as we were returning our car to the rental agency and our hotel was near the Left Bank or maybe in it so, besides touring Versailles, which really isn't in Paris, and visiting a WWI battlefield, which would have involved intricate travel plans to get to and return in the same day, I was a blank slate on what I wanted to see and do.

I booked a tour of Versailles because I well remember from tenth grade history the phrase of L'etat c'est moi from Louis XIV's reign as signifying that king's godlike power and the teacher's discussion of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles reflecting France's greatness at the time, and perhaps we discussed the gardens at Versailles signifying the Sun King's opulence, heady stuff for a 15 year old about to break out in a love of history that led to a history major in college (that's why I ultimately became a lawyer).  (The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.)

As I waved goodbye to my two friends Eric and Rhea as they disappeared into the Metro station to depart for the airport, they pointed to a structure 400 meters away across the Seine and said, "That's Notre Dame."  I took that wonderment in during the next few hours and the next day I tramped from the Eiffel Tower to the Paris Opera, exploring the Place de Concord along the way, and took a tour of the hilly neighborhood of Montmartre and visited its Sacred Heart chapel overlooking Paris.  My last day in Paris I viewed the beautiful art in the Musee d'Orsay and took my tour of Versailles, which I think I will always remember as the highlight of my trip to Paris (that, and visiting Notre Dame because, horrifyingly, it burned extensively a mere two weeks later) and the next day I returned to the US and finally had my first cup of satisfying coffee in two weeks at the local McDonalds.  (Les Quatre Parties du Monde Soutenant la Sphere.)

Normandy

Seventy five years ago, on June 6, 1944, the Allied forces (ABC--Americans, British and Canadians ) landed on five D-Day beaches and wrenched back Europe into light from the darkness it had descended into under Hitler.  Starting closest to Paris, on the most direct line into the heart of Germany to end the scourge of Nazism was Sword beach (british), Juno beach (Canadian), Gold Beach (British), Omaha beach (American) and on the Cotentin peninsula, Utah beach (American).  (Desperate moments on Omaha beach 75 years ago.)

The British were supposed to take Caen, the Norman capital with its important road junctions out of the confining bocage country and into open tank country, on the first day but they failed to do so and hard fighting lay ahead for the rest of the summer in Normandy as German armored reinforcements steadily came on to be engaged in a stalemate by the British and Canadians as the Americans loaded up a "right punch" to finally break out of Normandy at the end of August.  Certainly Operation Overlord was no sure thing, it was a close thing perhaps, there was no Plan B if the landings failed, and what I discerned from tramping over the beaches for two days was how far apart the beaches were and how, with a little luck and a better performance by the Luftwaffe, the Germans might have exploited the initial gaps between the five beachheads and driven the Allies into the sea in piecemeal fashion.  (The long walk in from the low tide point on Gold beach.)

The most success was had at Gold beach as the British Green Howards drove almost to Bayeux the first day and established a firm lodgment with some depth, although not as far inland as the plans called for.  The three Allied Airborne units sowed confusion in the German rear and prevented coherent counterattacks on the beaches, and the Americans poured ashore on Utah beach where they met negligible resistance thanks to an effective naval and air bombing that worked as planned there alone amongst the five beaches.  (A Green Howard at rest on the tip of the spear on the evening of the Longest Day.)

Tragedy ensued on Omaha beach as the first wave was slaughtered, and off Juno beach as SS troopers systematically executed Canadian POWs in cold blood at Ardenne Abbey.  But our forces prevailed and it was very poignant to spend two days walking in the footsteps of heroes and giants on the beaches and battlefields and in the cemeteries there.  (The Price. The Canadian cemetery, one of many Allied cemeteries in Normandy.)

 

Bayeux

Bayeux in Normandy, France, is the town from which King William the Conquerer launched his invasion of England in 1066 which culminated in his victory over King Harold at the Battle of Hastings.  In town is a famous 950 year-old tapestry, 70 yards long and consisting of a few dozen sewn cloth panels of thread, linen and wool depicting the events of that momentous year from the victor's viewpoint.

It's a beautiful medieval village with narrow, winding streets, some paved with cobblestones, with joined buildings just past the narrow sidewalks which give the byways a canyon-like appearance. Residents engage in the very French way of life by buying food or wine for that night rom open-front stores on their way home from work, walking most likely.

A farmers market comes to the public square every weekend top provide whatever else the residents might need, because it sells everything from clothing to live fowls to fresh fish to wines and cheeses or even cooked foods.  My two friends and I were there to visit the five D-Day beaches nearby on this 75th-year anniversary of that stupendous battle.

Bayeux mostly bears no scars from that battle which raged in Normandy all summer during 1944, because it was captured intact by the Allies in the first week of fighting before it had a chance to be devastated by the shelling conducted by both sides during their battles that demolished many Norman towns and villages.  In town we enjoyed evening meals in local restaurants, nighttime views of the town's tremendous chapel, morning forays along the main street in search of coffee and afternoon walks past the butcher shops, produce shops, pastry shops and fish shops lining the business district.

London

The two full days I spent in London were a whirlwind of activity.  The first day I toured the Churchill Wartime Bunkers beneath Britain's Treasury Department, rode in one of the fabled Black Taxis in London, ate lunch at a teeming outdoor market, visited historic Trafalgar Square, took High Tea at the Portrait Gallery and went to see the production of Company starring Patti LuPone at the West End that evening.

Things didn't slow down the second day.  I took a long walk along the Thames to go see all the statues around Parliament Square, visited the Supreme Court building and passed by Big Ben, had lunch at the Temple Gardens Hall, toured the replica Globe Theater, saw an all-female-of-color production of Richard the Secondhand walked by St. Paul's Cathedral when it was all lit up.

This was an exhausting pace but well worthwhile for the limited time we were in London.  There is so much history there, I saw pockmarks from a bomb dropped by a German zeppelin in World War I, a statue commemorating heroic first-responders during the London Blitz, the aforementioned Globe Theatre recreation, Parliament, the Thames and more.

The next morning we got up early to take a 6:30 a.m. chunnel train the Paris, and oddly, we had to show our passport to leave London.  Whenever the Uber driver made a turn or crossed over a street I always felt panic because at first glance it seemed he was driving down the opposing lane with oncoming traffic due to the insane way that British drivers drive from the wrong side of the car.

Oxford

Back in March, I went, with two friends and former running buddies from California, Eric and Rhea, to England and France for two weeks.  Eric graduated from Magdalene College in Oxford so he was uniquely qualified to escort us around Oxford, and he lived in Paris for a year so he spoke passable French.

We spent two full days in Oxford, a lovely old English town with centuries-old buildings, narrow winding streets flanked by walls on both sides and more than two dozen universities.  Oxford wasn't bombed in World War II, reportedly because Hitler planned to use it as the Nazis' capital city when the Germans occupied England, so all of its old, beautiful buildings remain as they have been for centuries.

I attended two concerts in the Sheldonian Theatre, ate plenty of meat pies in pubs, including venison, perambulated several of the colleges including Christ Church, watched crew rowers on the Cherwell River and did a ton of walking.  I attended a worship service at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin which dates back to 1280.

After an informative multi-day visit to an old English town, viewing its attractions and artifacts, including the university library where the ancient manuscripts are locked onto the shelf by long chains and several colleges' eating halls, we three boarded a bus bound for London.We had a full planned schedule of events to attend and places to see there.

Over There.

A few pictures from my recent (and first) trip overseas, to England and France.  (The killing ground on Omaha Beach in Normandy.)

Oxford was a very picturesque English town, an hour north of London.  (Having a draft at a pub on my first night in Oxford with my running buddy from last decade, Bex.)

London is a great city, with a lot of history in it.  (Trafalgar Square.)

Paris is Paris.  (An American tourist in the City of Lights.)

A belated birthday wish

The mother of my children had a birthday while I was in Europe, she is far closer to 70 now than 60.  I hope she's happy with her new husband, she's not the type of person who feels complete unless she has a person she can subtly and totally control; I am far happier without her although I grieve over the de facto loss of my three children, now mature adults, whom she totally turned against me as tender children during the divorce in my opinion with her insidious and invidious ways of control.

They are the true victims, as studies show that the children of a parent who introduced hatred against the other parent into their hearts grow up depressed, lacking confidence and unable to form emotional bonds, even with their own children.  I haven't received much information about my children since their early teen or pre-teen years when she secretly initiated the divorce by taking them out of state on false pretenses and started their total inclusion in her camp by subtly imploring them, while she was in control, to be in solidarity all together with her against their father who was according to her of an overbearing or dissolute character.

Unfortunately from what little I do know, now one seems to be a grifter, one a drifter and one a hanger-on.  And they had such potential, absent, in my opinion, her ruinous, self-centered influence in having them sue me as children during the pendency of the divorce.

I am afraid of one, who was manipulated to threaten me during the divorce, have received virtually zero information about and upon another for over a decade, and know the third is doing his best to subtly manipulate me, in his best impersonation of her, by doing things like visiting adults he knew growing up in the immediate neighborhood but not me in the sure knowledge that this potentially hurtful activity will get back to me later in idle conversations with neighbors.  I hope your special day was truly special, as befits you, Sharon Rogers Lightbourne.

Happy Mothers Day...

...to my mom

... and to all mothers out there.

Coming Back?

I've had a lot of injuries in the last two years that kept me from running.  I strained my achilles tendon two springs ago and that forced me to the couch for nine months because I couldn't run through it, or run at all, and for two months two summers ago I was in The Boot, which helped my healing.

I came back to running last spring and was slowly kicking up my pace, mileage and conditioning when mid-summer I was felled by a detached retina which required four surgeries, two of them emergency operations and two more that were delayed for weeks or months because of various circumstances on the surgeons' part.  

The first surgery hurt a lot (I don't believe I was sedated properly, if at all) but the second was the worst although I was out so I didn't feel a thing.  They filled my eye with oil to keep my eye pressure sufficient for  the retina to heal properly without deteriorating further. Reinas heal slowly, believe me.

But worse still was the feeling it engendered within me.  There was an organ in my body (my eye) that was foreign (filled with silicon) and my body wanted it out.  A few times a day I experienced white flares in my vision, good as it was in its permanently impaired state, that rose from lower left corner of my affected right eye like a nova and I would still all motion until it subsided and went away.  Exposure of my optic nerve as the oil in my eye sloshed around?  I don't know, I just got a vague answer from my ophthalmologist when I complained to him about it and he just told not to do it.  Well!

Worse still was that it felt like if I fell hard due to my shaky vision, say I pitched forward by tripping on broken  or uneven pavement, that my eye might split open.  Yep, that's what my foreign eye felt like, very strange, and I stayed on the couch till my third operation in December when they took the oil out (or at least most of it--I have these maddening residual small silicon globules floating around through my vision permanently like tiny astroid clouds from the oil they couldn't completely flush out when they operated).

Then I had cataract surgery on that eye last month, a cataract that developed suddenly and rapidly due to the eye trauma I experienced, as is normal with retina detachment repair, and I feel now that my eye, and my vision, is as good as it's going to get and my eye is healed.  

So on May 1, I went out for an intended slow half-mile run, after stretching assiduously.  I made a quarter mile before I had to walk a block, twice.

That first week I ran a second time and that time I pushed through my overwhelming urge to stop after a quarter mile and finished my half mile run, getting my second wind on the backside of the run.

This week I was going to run a half-mile three times.  I ran a slow half-mile on Monday and it went okay.  I even picked up the pace a little the last two blocks.

This morning I had to wait for an electrician to come deal with a problem at my house, so the morning was used up before my thoughts turned to adhering to my running schedule.  Here was the crisis, I wanted to have lunch instead and I didn't feel like getting into my running togs.  But I changed and went out into the street and started stretching my achilles.  The neighborhood steady runner ran by and stopped to talk and our discussion soon turned from politics to running.  I told him I was trying to return to running and my planned slow schedule.  He nodded approvingly and asked if I was returning from my run or about to set off.  I truthfully told him that I was "procrastinating."

He laughed and said I should make sure my pace wasn't too fast.  "You're going to run, right?" he said, looking dubiously at me.  "Yeah, yeah," I said as he set out on his run and I started stretching again.  I sure didn't feel like it.

But I walked over to the W&OD Trail and got underway at a slow shuffle.  My neighbor passed me going the other way on his eight mile run, having entered the trail a different way half a mile up.  Here I was just starting my half-mile run.  He said, "You're going too fast!" as he ran by.  "Slow down."  

I decided he wasn't mocking me but that he was right, and I slowed down to barely past a walk.  But I made the half mile run feeling good once I got underway and again, I picked up the pace at the end.  Best of all, I haven't injured myself or lazily gotten off schedule--yet.  A half-mile on Friday, repeat the schedule another week, and then I'll kick it up even further, I hope.  It seems pathetically slow (literally) but otherwise I might stop in discouragement if I put on too much mileage or pace right now.

Changes

I hate change, but it's inevitable.  My bank used to be across the street, where I could get cash from the ATM and deposit checks, but it was closed by Capital One for being underperforming and now I have to drive to my bank and the service sucks.

I used to be able to walk to the main provision center of my HMO which was in my home town with 24-hour care, but Kaiser built  new main center in Tysons Corner which I now have to drive to, it's impossible to find on the first try and traffic out there sucks.  To pick up a prescription at my rump HMO center in town takes at least half an hour waiting in line.

My mortgage holder used to have an office across the street and I had overdraft protection linked to my home equity line of credit but Capital One sold my mortgage to a fly-by-night provider (who begins every phone conversation with an offsetting warning that this conversation is an attempt to collect a debt, unless you're in bankruptcy) and my HELOC to a different fly-by-night company so my checking account no longer has overdraft protection.

Next door is a drugstore which I walk to often to buy toiletries and incidentals, food, beer or wine, and to check my B/P, treating it like an old-time dimestore.  Rite Aid just announced it would close the store next month as being underperforming, leaving me with no store I can walk to handily.

The Assist

In the Safeway I noticed the encounter of a middle-aged man with an elderly, frail woman at the checkout counter when the cashier ringing up the woman casually handed her a light bag of groceries and the elderly lady almost pitched over as she placed it in her cart. The man in line behind her started to reach out to steady her but discretely stepped back when she successfully regained her equilibrium.

The woman handed the cashier a fistful of coupons and then learned that she couldn't use her best one, a ten-dollars-off coupon if the grocery bill was $50. Her total was $49.

She fumblingly put her credit card in the card reader and lamented her loss of ten dollars off but also spoke of her good fortune as well.  "It's too bad I can't use the ten dollar coupon, I counted up my purchases carefully but I gave you too many lesser coupons and now my total is too small.  But this is my first shopping trip in eighteen months after the fracture so I guess I'm doing okay.  I'll just use it the next time I come, if I can get over $50 then."

You and I both know what we would do.  Look anywhere for a one dollar item, a candy bar or anything, so we could then benefit from the ten dollar coupon to achieve a nine dollar savings.  But the lady was evidencing a trace of confusion as she said she didn't want to delay the checkout line.

The man behind her was surveying his items on the conveyor belt and then, handing her two of his four yogurt cups, said, "These are seventy cents each, Ma'am.  If you added these to your purchase, then you could then use your ten dollar coupon because it would put your total over fifty dollars.  I don't know if you like yogurt but it would save you almost nine dollars off your current bill."

She gratefully accepted the two small containers and handed them to the cashier who rang them up. Her total dropped from $49 to forty dollars and change.  The lady helpfully added to the man that she liked yogurt, she spread it on toast, using it like peanut butter.