Texas

El Paso, Texas

Sitting by the pool - El Paso, Texas

Valentine, Texas

Harry's - Alpine, Texas

John and Cass

John's beautiful car

The front of John's beautiful car.

Downtown Marfa, Texas.

Micheladas at the San Jose Hotel in Austin.

Dana and Melinda in Austin.

Utah, Colorado, New Mexico

The fish we caught and ate - Kent Lake, Utah

Cove Fort, Utah

Arches National Park - Utah

Our cabin near Mesa Verde, Colorado

Exploring the cave dwellings I

Exploring the cave dwellings II

Cave dwellings - Mesa Verde, Colorado

Our lovely motel - Santa Fe, New Mexico

Monterey, Santa Barbara, LA, and Las Vegas

Steinbeck was here .. once.

Selena's - Santa Barbara

A table at Todd's house - Los Angeles

Venice Beach

Margarita Wednesday - Los Angeles

The Getty Museum gardens - Los Angeles

A grocery store wall - Los Angeles

"Double Down"

"The Roulette Kid"

Fremont Street, Las Vegas

The Canals of Venice ... Las Vegas

Northern California, San Francisco

Definitely Fog

The Astro Inn

Breakfast

A nap in the woods

Dog or Bear?

Mrs. Adams Harford: The Histories of a Child

July 5, 2008 We have been traveling for five days and now find ourselves in San Francisco. Yesterday we went to a Giants game and after several hours of seemingly harmless clouded sunshine, I now sport bright red arms and shoulders that radiate a temperature that my body was previously unaware of. I like San Francisco. I like the city in the way that you like a stranger for the possibility of what they could be if only you were to get to know them and learn a few of their secrets. It wouldn't need to be a long friendship only passionate.

There are only fragments of memories that cling like residue to my perception of childhood. Somehow San Francisco has always been more prevalent then the rest of those cameo appearances of towns and cities. It wasn't the happiest of times, it wasn't the worst, but maybe it was the most interesting.
I was seven-years-old and my mother, father, brother and I lived on Pine street near Nob Hill edging Chinatown. I remember the yellowish brick that adorned the exterior and seemed to blend in perfectly with the sidewalk and sky at the same time. We lived on the third floor. My father's best friend lived one floor above us and habitually left the playboy channel on which ensued my brother and I having to cover our eyes or turn our heads as we walked through the apartment for a visit. There was only one occasion that I remember betraying that rule and to my surprise and great confusion I glimpsed a cartoon. John Boyd, I coveted his name as if he were just as much my friend as my father's. To me he wasn't a man but a pillar of consistency amongst constant change. Across from the apartment building on the corner was a small market where my father would buy scratch-its and let my brother and I scrape away their gummy surfaces in search of a prize that held no real significance to us as children. I wonder if my father thought it was lucky to let us scratch the tickets, I wonder if he ever won? Outside of the little market, which was in perfect view from our living room window, was a drug dealer. I knew this at the age of seven, and could repeat it to anyone interested or not, but the meaning of that person was completely abstract to me. He may as well have been selling coffee cups or pocket wrenches, it was all meaningless to a child. To my parents it was a marker, we lived in a bad neighborhood. The four of us lived in a one bedroom apartment. My father slept in the living room on the couch, not because of the divorce two years earlier but because my father always slept on the couch. I attribute it to his old world protectiveness. My mother, brother and I slept on an air mattress in the bedroom, whether it existed or not I don't remember any other furniture. We were poor but only today can I recognize that. There is no poor for a seven-year-old child. There is starving, which we were not; there is unhappy, which we were not.

Louie was more that just a brother, he was my best friend. Our bond grew even stronger learning that we were different from all of the other kids at school. It was hard to figure out why we were so isolated seeing as all the kids looked different from each other: Chinese, Japanese, and African in heritage. I know that it was difficult, uncomfortable and unusual to be the only white girl at a school of several hundred, but if it would not have been for one bully in particular I don't think I would have minded the circumstances so much. Lakeesha tormented me regularly, following me to the bathroom at recess, tripping me, teasing me incessantly. I hated her but found no satisfaction the afternoon she fell out of the back of the school bus while it was stopped at the top of a hill. She got a concussion and cried horribly before the medics arrived. I felt bad for her and even though I wasn't the one who pulled that emergency exit handle, I felt my anger was responsible for the event.
Throughout the teasing at school, the tiny apartment and the drug dealer across the street I have clear happy memories of that time. Memories of the Chinese new year feeding the dragon, learning Kung Fu in the basement of our building, and ribbon dancing. Mostly I remember the four of us being together. That was the last time we all lived together, divorced or not it meant a great deal to my brother and I, in 1987 and today.

Mr. Adams-Harford: Smoke or Fog.

More than once on our trip through northern California, Cass and I have wondered out loud, "is that smoke, or is it fog?" I set out on this trip with several questions wandering around in the back of my mind. Namely, "will we want to come back?" and "what the hell are we doing anyway?" Those questions, like the question of smoke or fog, will almost certainly never truly be answered, but I am beginning to wonder if the questions aren't more important than the answers.
We have had some wonderful little adventures so far; camping among the ageless redwoods, getting a headache on 'Confusion Hill', making friends with a bear-dog in the coastal town of Crescent City, trying to take pictures of adventurous cows grazing on impossibly high cliffs, not being able to buy ice on Highway 1 because it had all been allocated to the cause of fighting fires. And I have set myself upon some precursory objectives for the trip; I will accept any offer from a stranger (so long as it does not cause me harm), I will read War and Peace for its greatness and so that I can remember how to truly read - how to absorb the page the word the idea, and I will always work toward being a better man for myself and also for Cassandra.
Why the honeymoon anyway? A further celebration of the union I suppose - just in case the newlyweds don't get a chance to celebrate during the rest of their lives spent together. The thing is, and I can't write this without coming off as conceited, everyday really is a celebration for Cass and I. Which is not to say that we are that couple who spend every moment staring lost in each other's eyes, unable to tear ourselves away from our profound love even long enough to acknowledge the other people we are having dinner with. Those moments may exist, but ours is a more grounded love. The moments of frustration matter just as much as those of bliss. We are in love with each other, and we are almost equally in love with life and all that it entails - all of its unforeseen pitfalls and undeniable currents.
So maybe what we saw was smoke, a remnant of the devastation being wreaked upon the breathtaking scenery around us, and maybe it was just fog, harmless and unquestioning. But maybe it was something else entirely, some unknown in between thing that defies naming or meaning. Either way, it is much like us - drifting across the complex landscape with no particular direction or purpose, having an affect on everything it touches and also being affected by those things.
Why are we on this trip? I would respond to that question with another, "smoke or fog?" Which is to say, does it really matter?

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