Just Dance (like its 2012)!

 

The venerable Wii remote used in the "Just Dance" app. Brings back fun memories.

Today is the 20th birthday of my twin nieces. It seems like yesterday they were rushing into my arms as three year olds and I was throwing them up into the air and catching them, something they made me do for years whenever I saw them, until they got too big.

I just got to see them two weeks ago. We had dinner together, at the invitation of my sister, their mother. Then I got to see them again a few days later in Estes Park, at a horse show where they were both riding in a jumping competition. It was a lovely time.

Today I got up early so I could I be the first ones to text them on their birthday. They both replied enthusiastically to my birthday wishes by text. I figured they would be off with their boyfriends doing young people things and maybe have a party at my sister's house of some kind.

Just a few minutes ago, as I was thinking about them, I was scrolling through my Youtube feed and something uncanny happened. The algorithm decided to suggest the video an old obscure pop song from twenty years ago, one that I only know because during one of my visits (I want to say it was July 2012, over their birthday that year) was one of the songs that my nieces liked to dance along with, with their "Just Dance 4" Wii app in the basement of their Westminster house. The app is one where you hold the Wii remote and try to perform the dance moves you see on the screen, being performed by cartoons outlines of dancers, and it tallies up the score based on how well it thinks that you performed the moves, and you get bonuses if you do it especially well.

It was the first and only time I ever danced with the Wii. They were old pros by then, even as seven year old and had to show me what to do. I was tremendous fun to dance with them that way. 

I had never heard the song I mention before that day, or heard it since then. But today of all days the Youtube algorithm decided I needed to be reminded of the song. Here the original is below. The lyrics are in Spanish and impossible to understand, so don't bother. Some of the syllables are just nonsense sounds. Evidently it was massive hit in Europe and much of the rest of the world, but it didn't make much of a splash in the U.S., which is why I probably had never heard of it before that day in the basement. I learned all this from the Wikipedia article about it (link).

Just imagine the 47-year-old me doing those hand flutters that culminate in that pose with the hands on the front and back of the head, trying to shimmy my knees at the same time, alongside two seven year old girls bouncing up and down with the music doing the same thing. Very, very good memories.

Edit: Ha! I think I might have found the Just Dance video itself. Beautiful memories. One of the best days of my life. Now you can dance along too, if you dare. Hope you like a flamenco rhythm. The colored hands of the dancers are the ones in which one is supposed to be holding the Wii remote.

From Wikipedia:

"The Ketchup Song" is about a young man named Diego who enters a nightclub. The DJ, a friend of Diego's, plays Diego's favorite song, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang, and Diego dances and sings along to the song, imitating its chorus with Spanish gibberish.

"Aserejé" is, therefore, a meaningless word, with the chorus "Aserejé, ja, de je, de jebe tu de jebere ..." being a somewhat incorrect imitation of the Rapper's Delight's "I said a hip-hop, the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop

The song is quite an ear worm and can drive you crazy if you hear it too much. If you dare, here is the original music video, which is what popped up in my feed today, unleashing this whole memory stream. The dance moves of the young women in the original are more sophisticated than anything one has to do with the Wii, but the Wii is more fun. Nothing wrong with fun.

Y la baila! Y la goza! Y la canta!

(And the dancing! And the fun! And the singing!)

Inside the Beehive Chapel

Standing before the open gate of the compound of Mary Undoer of Knots, I paused a minute to take in the beautiful vista of the buildings and the forested mountain ridge beyond. 

Just as it was the first time seeing the gate open, it was the first time I'd seen people in the compound. What looked to be a family with teenage sons was crossing the short footbridge to the octagonal wooden chapel. The structure had the unique and pleasing appeal of appearing old in design yet recent in construction. 

Without lingering further, I crossed the gate opening, happy to finally be inside the compound after four times staying in Summerhaven. It was not quite yet four o'clock, so I took a few minutes to explore the compound, poking around the outdoor shelter structure, which turned out to be dedicated to veterans of the various branches of the armed services. I connected it to the fact that I'd seen Gene wearing a military service cap. It also explained why one could hear "Taps" playing each evening from the compound.

Then I inspected the small wooden residence, which turned out to be a guest cottage that rentable by single people or married couples (as I would learn from the website). Then I crossed the footbridge to the chapel. I went the long way around to the entrance, as it turns out, and tried to go what amounted to the side door, which I opened and immediately found Father Martin standing on the other side in his priestly vestments. He recognized me from the day before by name, and then directed me further along to the front entrance.

There on the downhill side of the chapel I found what was obviously the front entrance, as the doors were wide open and one could see inside, and hear the singing. I wondered if I had come late, but it turns out this was preliminary activity of some kind, which probably has a name. This kind of thing is typical in Orthodox services, which can be long and ongoing. The idea is that people come and go during a longer liturgy, and in traditional parishes, one stands the entire time unless one is to weak to do.

At the door I was greeted by a woman whom I correctly identified as Catherine, the wife of Gene, who had identified himself the day before as "Catherine's husband." She was wearing a lace headcovering pinned to her hair. She greeted me with a happy smile, and handed me a small stack of items, including the current week's bulletin as well as a hardbound book of the Divine Liturgy with a rainbow of colored ribbons dangling from various pages, telling me that they would indicate various places that would be called out for us.

I stepped forward from the tiny vestibule all the way into the chapel, which was even more marvelous from the inside than the outside. The small structure was already crowded with about fifteen people sitting the plastic chairs that were set up in three rows of with a central aisle.

Along the sides of the chapel were wooden seats, separated from each other by small partitions as one sees in a traditional church. All of these were filled on either side. There were also plastic chairs around the back wall, and I quickly found one of the last ones available there and took a seat, gazing around the room, and upwards through the layers of the beehive structure to the top, where a round icon of Christ looked down on us. Around the walls were icons, and directly above our head was a octagonal metal ring structure for lighting.

It was only after sitting that I noticed the baby carriage next to me, which contained not an infant but a small black dog, which greeted me by licking my hand in a friendly manner. The woman on the other side mildly rebuked her pet, but I indicated it was no big deal, all the while hoping that in fact it would be no big deal during the service (it wasn't, and the dog was very well behaved).

In the back, past the wooden partition that separates the main part of the chapel from the inner sanctuary where one finds the altar, I could see Father Martin in his vestments waiting to start. 

Across the aisle from me I recognized Gene. He was standing at what I would later learn is the analogion, a wooden lectern with a steep slanted surface on which books or icons can be placed, and usually with a small lamp, so that one can read while standing up. He was singing, and several members of he congregation were singing as well, from the same book I had been given. I due course Gene called out a ribbon color and page number. I opened my book and found the page. I attempted to sing along from the music. As I did so it brought back a flood of memories of being in my college choir in Salem, attempting to sight-sing music on the first try. I was terrible at that, having had little training. Almost everyone else around me, seemingly all the baritones, knew how to do it. The music majors could pick up a piece of music and sing it correctly in rhythm and pitch right off the bat. The guys who knew how to play brass instruments like the trumpet were the best, since sight-singing is not too far off from how one makes notes on a trumpet.

To me this was, and still is, a mysterious skill that seems outside the ability of my mind to understand. I college, I learned my parts by going to the piano rooms in the music building on my own and plunking out the notes one by one (at least I could do that).

Now forty years later, I wondered if I could do any better. The music snippets Gene was singing was small repetitive chants, sometimes with the same words but in a different sequence of notes each time. Trying to follow him I lapsed into the same frustration as in college, but then I decided just to switch off my worry. I decided not to worry about figuring out the pitch but just listen to everyone else and try to jump into the note along side them. So I was always listening to everyone else, just trying to sing in tune with the guys around me.

But I did notice that if I ceased carrying about pitch but instead focussed on the rhythm---quarter notes, half notes, etc.---I was fairly decent and being able to read how long to hold a note. 

Also I noticed that I could scan the notes and anticipate when the line was descending to the root note at the end of the phrase and could hit that note on my own when we got to it. It reminded of a trick in language learning I had figured out along the way. One of the most difficult aspects of language learning for me is the listening. Even if I can communicate in a foreign language, it can be very hard to understanding anything anyone is saying. 

This has been a long frustration of mine, especially with French, which I learned to speak in high school through great diligence of practice with grammar and repetition. But for the life of me, I can barely understand anyone speaking French in a full speed conversation even to this day. Hanging out with friends in France back in the day, I could tell them anything I needed to say, and they would understand, but when they spoke to each other, it was always a big blur and I could infer from context at times, but not always. I would try to understand each sentence, and maybe I would get the first couple words, but my mind could not keep up after that and each sentence would descend into a confused jumble in my head

As such I was always looking for the trick that would allow me to make the mental shift to understand languages. The Internet, especially Youtube, changed everything At some point recently, I made a breakthrough. I realized I had it backwards, literally. I realized that one should not attempt to understand by following each spoken sentence in a linear fashion. Instead one should focus on attempting to pick out and understand the last word of a sentence, and working back from there. Somehow this produced much better results and was far more relaxing and less frustrating than to try to understand each word as it was spoken.

Fortunately I was spared the burden of sight singing because after the service started--promptly at four byt the tolling of the bells outside---Catherine came inside and stood on my right side, in front of a small bench that was obviously her usual perch by the door. With her nice alto voice in my ear, I found it easy to stay on pitch the entire service. And there was lots of singing, and page flipping from ribbon to ribbon, with page numbers called out by Gene.

Mary Undoer of Knots

 My hike was vigorous and rewarding to the point of making me remember entire aspects of my being that I had suppressed. Awakening neglected aspects of physical movement was like turning on the lights in darkened wings of a building that had been shuttered for years. 

As such I was on quite a high as I trudged back up hill to the hotel, past the clumps of parked cars of day visitors and then finally into Summerhaven. It was noon. I'd been gone three hours and had improvised approximately five miles.

"I need to do this again on a regular basis," was the thought that occurred to me. I don't think I'd had as good a hike since our last trip to Estes Park in 2022, when I did my usual roaming in Rocky Mountain National Park. 

My return left me plenty of time to relax and get cleaned and freshened up for the Divine Liturgy at four.  Jessica had been watching Wimbledon during my entire absence, as she is big fan of tennis. I spent the afternoon on the balcony, where it feels like a treehouse, reading about Samuel Johnson's childhood and his formative single year at Oxford. He was a very angry youth, I learned, resentful most of all because of his poverty. 

At a quarter to four, I left and went down the outdoor stairs and followed the path to the ground level at the street, then walked down about a hundred yards on the new sidewalk there to Upper Goat Hill Road where one sees the sign for the shrine, which they put up last year. From there I trudged up panting a bit until I reached the place where it levels off. I saw the cars parked on the side of the street where usually there are none. I had told Father Martin about having come to this spot outside the metal gate to pray the rosary, looking out over the houses and green hills on the opposite ridge. From that spot, one looks down into the compound, which consists on the left of the small chapel which is an octagonal structure (a very Byzantine design), a wooden beehive like the forest churches of Russia and Scandinavia. Atop it was an Orthodox cross. with the diagonal beam. Like all residences on the hill, it was on cement pylons to cope with the stope. The beehive structure was rimmed by a wooden walkway, and it was connected to the rest of the compound by a pair of narrow wooden footbridges.

Across the footbridge in the main part of the compound was what looked to be a small two-story residence in the same style. To the right, and further up the slope, looked to be some kind of large picnic shelter or ourdoor ceremonial structure. This was as close as I had seen it in years past. 

Now for the first time, the gate was unlocked and open.

On the Arizona Trail

 I woke up on Saturday morning, our second full day at the lodge, with a sense of excitement at the days plans. Not only had I resolved to attend the Divine Liturgy at Mary Undoer of Knots, and practically promised to do so,  but I had glorious plans to go hiking.

Each time coming up to Summerhaven, I had made it a point to walk down the main road through the rest of the village for about a mile until it dead ends at a national forest fee entrance where there are picnic grounds and several trailheads. The picnic grounds are usually full of people on day trips from Tucson, and there is little parking (parking is the great premium in Summerhaven---the lodge room comes with free but not guaranteed parking).

But the most hiking I had done was hardly any at all, in all my visit. Just walking down the hill to the fee entrance and coming back up had satisfied my curiosity so far, perhaps additionally following the trail down the creek briefly before turning around.

This year I wanted it to be different. I seriously needed a good hike. I felt disconnected from my body in a disturbing way. Last summer I had felt like I was rotting inside in the heat, especially when stricken by the vertigo and balance issues. I had done one serious hike recently, in the McDowells, and had tortured myself by overextending myself to the point of endangering my life (given how many people die each year). Now I was up in the pines, in a cooler environment. I yearned to get outside and feel my legs moving.

I left after breakfast, walking out of the hotel with my REI light day back, and with a flask of water. The amount of water one uses depends a lot on the temperature and heat. The day looked to be cool, with dark grey clouds covering the sky. Good hiking weather.

I started heading down the hill on the main road, but instead of going all the way down to the fee entrance as I  had in previous years, I forked off onto a side road up the mountain that supposedly led to another trailhead, according to a sign. I wanted to explore it.  It took about twenty minutes to wind my way up through the residential area to get to the trailhead. As I always do I scrutinized the map at the entrance euntil I had a sense of the entire route, and then took a picture of map with my phone.

It was a glorious hike. The route was narrow and rocky winding up further until it leveled out in an area that was still recovering from a fire years ago. As such it felt like being above the tree line in the Rockies. In fact, the whole experience brought back to me the feeling of an alpine hike, the kind I had not in years. It made me realize how deficient is the desert for satisfying my soul that way. It's not just about the heat and the sun. It's about something deeper, and I could sense I was experiencing something my soul had starved for.

It felt almost awkward, humiliating to come to this realization. What a benighted life I had been living. I felt years younger all at once, as if my life had been interrupted and was now resuming.

It was also a magnificent test for my new barefoot hiking shoes. I had ordered them almost two months ago but had not worn them until a few days ago. Instantly I discovered that they were a key to recovering core strength I had lost last year. They gave me back an ability to feel the ground with my feet in a way that radiating up my legs and body.  The gloom I had felt for a year, at least over that, disappeared when I was on the trail. I could tell my core was still not as strong as it was, but I knew it was just a matter of time and effort to recover further. 

Overall, I loved the shoes, at least when I was on a smooth trail. The shoes are not ideal for trails with lots of rock, however. For one thing, if one steps on a jagged rock edge, one can feel it directly on one's feet. Likewise it is quite possible to stub one's big toe on a rock with these things, as I discovered at one point. Were to look for the idea hiking shoe, I would adapt these ones with a slightly thicker part in the middle of the sole, and maybe a thickened part for the big toe. Meditating on this as I hiked, I thought of the hardcore ultralight trekkers, mostly young of course, who hike the Continental Divide trail and such in shoes that are basically sandals. This is to save weight on one's feet, so one does not use up strength and calories lifting the weight of a hiking boot over and over.  For myself, I need more covering--perhaps a little bit more than the shoes provided.

It was a pleasure to sink into such thoughts. I followed the trail over several ridges into the official wilderness area and then took the fork that led down a gorge to exactly the fee entrance I was familiar with. The last section coming down the gorge is officially part of the Arizona Trail, which crosses the entire state south to north. It felt gratifying to hike a bit of it.

Then I walked back up the main road, as I normally would do, until I was back in Summerhaven at the hotel. It felt glorious--a great thing to do as part of the Fourth of July. But it made me realize that I have to do this on a more regular basis, this kind of hiking. The desert doesn't work for me, for various reasons. What to do?

Additional Notes: 

1. These are the shoes I was wearing---the Hike Caspians (link). I think I ordered size 11.  Besides the issues above, which can be remedied perhaps by ordering a different shoe, I noticed the toe box felt constrained on my right foot, where years ago I developed a mild bunion from wearing hiking shoes that squeezed my toes. I am forever in a quest to find shoes with ample room for my toes. The only trial shoes I found that would even come close were Salomons, which I worn for years, although they are still not wide enough in the toe box for me.

The Hike Caspians here sadly suffered a little bit from that. All that design and you are still squeezing my toes, just a slight curling of the middle toes on my right foot but enough for me to notice and be bothered by. This is despite the fact that everyone now says "we have wide toe boxes." Why is it impossible for anyone to actually believe and execute this? 

2. At one point, back between the ridges in the wilderness area, I managed to lose the trail. Somehow I thought I was supposed to scramble up a rock incline. When I got to the top, I saw what could possibly be the trail and began following it, but skeptical I made made the wrong choice. Not wanting to scramble back down the incline, I saw on a fallen burn log and rested while I admired the view of the wilderness and the top of nearby Mt. Lemmon (the actual mountain, that is), topped by an astronomical observatory from the University of Arizona. 

My patience was rewarded when several groups of hikers came along on the trail in the direction from where I'd come, talking loudly. They did not see me but I listened as they passed, and sure enough they did not follow me up the rock incline but proceeded along the trail below me. I noted where they passed and saw I could recover the trail easily without reversing course. 

Every good hike somehow has a moment where you think maybe you screwed up in a way that has put yourself in danger, even in a mild way. A hint of that feeling is like salt on a meal. It is useful to remind oneself of one's essential fragility, and that the elements and nature can be unforgivable, if one does not have proper respect for them.

3. At another point, I detoured off the trail, accidentally following a blind spur that came to a dead end at an overlook after a hundred feet. There I found, amidst the grassy brush, a small spring in the form of a tiny pond only two feet in diameter, and the marshy outflow going down the hill. There is something so beautiful about discovering something like that spontaneously.

4. If I were going to scold myself over anything it would be lack of preparedness for rain. I had a wool cover, but nothing impervious to rain. By the time I was ascending, dark clouds were rolling in. Realizing my stupidity, I began mentally preparing for the miserable experience of being caught in the middle of a downpour. Fortunately it never came. What really surprised me was that as I was coming down the gorge, with this mental preparation in mind, I saw folks casually hiking up the gorge from the trailhead at the fee entrance, dressed in the skimpiest of clothes. I may be stupid enough not to have packed rain gear but I'm not that stupid.

Meeting Father Martin

 Besides the rain clouds and the rain on the first night, one of the delightful twists of this first (second year in a row on the Fourth) was that I finally able to make a visit to the shrine of Mary Undoer of Knots, which is a tiny Byzantine Catholic compound hidden in the trees on the hillside opposite the hotel. The broadasting of the bells is a pleasant sound through the pines when one is at the lodge.

It has almost never been open, except by special appointment. This year was different. While waiting for the parade to start, I spotted, from our balcony, a man taking a seat in a folding chair on the opposite side of the main road. He had a long white beard and was wearing black robes. Instantly I knew he must be associated with the shrine, so I scurried down out of the hotel and crossed the street, approaching him as he was talking ato another man sitting beside him, who was wearing a military service cap.

I introduced myself (I can be quite social when I want to be) and asked if he was with the shrine. He said yes. His name was Father Martin. His companion introduced himself as "Gene, Husband of Katharine" although there was no woman present. I would later meet Katharine, and learn that the two of them are local residents who provide the secular organization of the shrine. Father Martin comes up part time. I told Father Martin how I'd been wanting to visit the shrine but was unable. He said that there was a chance the next afternoon for the Saturday afternoon Divine Liturgy. I believe this was the first time they had had the Liturgy there during any of my previous visits. It felt like the shrine was coming up in the world. I told Father Martin I would see him there, on the next day. I also conveyed to him that I was not Catholic. I had been to (western) Catholic masses, and to an Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy (most recently in Modesto last. year), but had never been to the Byzantine Catholic version of the Divine Liturgy. 

It's essentially the same liturgy as the one used by the Eastern Orthodox, deriving from one created by St. John Crysostom. The difference is the Byzantine Catholics are, in fact, fully ni communion with the Pope and part of the Catholic Church, but are allowed to contine to use the Eastern Rite. So they are sort of a hybrid missle ground between East and West. All this I knew. What was strange was to find such a parish in, of all places, the community of Summerhaven. To my knoweldge there were no other religious congregations on the mountain. You had to make the long drive down to Tuscon for any of that, juust like you do to fill up your gas tank and buy groceries beyond the general store essentials. Everyone worshipped down in the valley---except the Byzantine Catholics. All Catholics by the way are allowed to go the Byzantine version, and the next day I would meet some of them, as well as other tourists and looky lous like me.

Escape from the Internet

 Back from our three-night trip to Mt. Lemmon, specifically the Mt. Lemmon Lodge in Summerhaven. Driving up the mountain this year brought the trip of thunderstorms that had descended on the Tucson area on Thursday afternoon. It was a new experience to drive up the mountain with darkened rain cloods. We got rain overnight---a downpour that woke me from my sleep.

The next day, Friday, was the Fourth of July and the main activity was watching the parade at noon. Our room on the third floor of the lodge was pretty much the idea place to see it, if you were not down on the road. I took videos of the parade with iphone, both from the balcony and the road, which I played on my podcast that evening, sharing them with my viewers, because I had not much else prepared.

I had to do my podcast from down on the lodge patio balcony, with people at tables nearby. The wifi in our room on the third floor was terrible. I could barely get any connectivity on my phone using my data plan, and the wi-fi was hopeless. It was actually nice to have a break from connectivity.  I managed to read the entire intro to Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings, which I had brought at the last minute as leisure reading, taking it off Stack U of my newly designed alphabetized stacking system for my book in the ga

Samuel Johnson

 His literary career seems to divide naturally into three stages. Up to 1749 [age 40], he is the desperately poor, bitter, Grub Street journalist. The great works of this stage are London and The Life of Savage. From 1749 to 1762, he wins and consolidates his position as moralist and lexicographer; the monuments of this stage are The Vanity of Human Wishes, the three series of essays (Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler), the Dictionary, and Rasselas. The second stage is concluded by his reception of a pension. This radically altered both his way of life and his way of writing; it made him into the figure we know from Boswell, the ‘Great Cham of Literature’ (in Smollett’s phrase), and the greatest recorded talker of the language. The works of this stage - more relaxed, sprawling, colloquial —are the edition of Shakespeare, the Journey to the Western Islands, and The Lives of Poets. Through all three stages, but very sparsely in the first and in much the greatest mass in the third, is a stream of letters, prayers and journals, which ought to be regarded as no less part of his work than those writings which he printed.

From Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings, Penguin Classics, Preface by Patrick Crutwell

from Google:

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, Grub Street was “originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet.” The term was a metaphor for the commercial production of printed matter

wikipedia:

Moorfields was an open space, partly in the City of London, lying adjacent to – and outside – its northern wall, near the eponymous Moorgate. It was known for its marshy conditions, the result of the defensive wall acting as a dam, impeding the flow of the River Walbrook and its tributaries.

Ah, The River Walbrook. I studied this. I love the ancient rivers of London. The Walbrook was a stream that ran through what became "The City of London" (which itself was the old Roman garrison that was fortified with walls). London began as a Roman occupational fort to dominate the local Celtic presence. The Walbrook emptied directly into the Thames. The Walbrook was used as a fresh water supply. By the Industrial Revolution it became an open sewer and was bricked over. If I returned to London and needed something to do, I would retrace its ancient route.

I wrote about the Walbrook during my London history posts in 2016.  (link)

https://theticketcollector.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-thames-freezes-over-london-late.html

Zang on the Fourth of July

Hat to Mr. Silverstein, for inspiring this post.

Scottsdale, about to leave for Mount Lemmon Lodge in Summerhaven, Arizona

First you drive south on the Interstate (technically East on I-10) to Tucson and pick your way through the north part of the city on local roads for a half hour until you get to the edge of the city at the base of the Catalina Mountains. There is a single road that continues past there and it begins slowly winding up into the mountains past the ample saguaro groves that poke out from the rocky terrain. One goes up and up winding slowly with vistas of the city at pull outs. Then the saguaros trickle off, as it is too high in altitude for them. Climbing further, one sees down the cliffs to the ravines and rock formations. One is usually passing bicyclists in groups either climbing or descending. 

Finally one reaches the trees. All of a sudden one is in the pines. It feels like coming home each time. There are national forest picnic grounds and trail heads where cars are gathered, their occupants presumably on the nearby trail. One continues climbing and finally at eight thousand feet, six thousand above the valley floor (and at the altitude of Estes Park), one finds signs of civilization. There is a turnoff that goes to the top of the mountain proper, but following the road takes you into the community of Summerhaven, where the most prominent landmark one enters is the fire station, a reminder of devastating fire of twenty years ago that almost burned down the entire community, and from which the not-yet-regrown patches on the mountain are still visible. There is a restaurant, and a few gift shops. One continues past a small group of nice cottages for rent, somewhat amusingly called the Mount Lemmon Hotel, and then at last one reaches the Mount Lemmon Lodge, rebuilt only a few years ago after the historic century-old original burned down in the aforementioned fire. The new one looms above the road. Across the street is the general store which is the heart of the community at this point, and which is also worth a visit. Further down, if one were to continue past the lodge, there is a pizza/cookie restaurant with outdoor seating, and going further one could leave the thick part of the community and eventually dead end at a trailhead that leads into the gulch.

When I first came to Tucson while swinging through Arizona in 1989, my uncle told me about Mt. Lemmon and how by going up it, it is as if one goes north a thousand miles to the Canadian border, in terms of ecosystem and climate. It is probably the best known example of what they call a "sky island" (there are evidently such things in the Sahara too). I was intrigued, and years later, in February 2013, when I came through here on my own while vagabonding in the Bimmer, and visited my uncle again, I made sure to go to the top where I snowshoed at the ski resort there---the furthest south I've ever snowshoed. 

I haven't been up in winter since then. I told Jessica about it, and after our first visit, she eagerly makes reservations as much as possible, including for the Fourth of July two years running, as soon as they open up. Last year we had the corner room on the 3rd floor which allowed the best viewing of the 4th of July parade.

A front came through last night here in Scottsdale. I thought it would be a dust storm and I cleared off the patio and brought the rice paper screen and my library books inside, as I keep them out on the table there. Dust storms can be a menace here, and can be hazardous to health. Instead we got rain and it smelled fresh this morning as I drank my coffee.

It might rain while we are up at Mt. Lemmon. Evidently they got a bunch last night. The streams really flow and it feels like heaven when they do, but even if they don't it will be lovely. I will sit on the balcony outdoors and look across at the mountain, seeing the houses hidden among the trees on the steep hill, and the onion dome of the Byzantine Catholic chapel of the small compound of Our Lady Undoer of Knots, the bells of which are rung on a daytime schedule. I will fantasize as ever about what it would be like to live up here. I'd probably never want to go down to the valley floor. But of course there are dental visits.