I woke up, itching intensely. My thigh had been bitten by an execrable critter with the temerity to invade my bedding and create a huge and hideous scarlet welt that thumbed its nose at all the anti-itch creams and ointments in my medicine cabinet.
All in Life Lessons
By the time I was nine years old I had been yearning for a two-wheeled bike for two years and three months but there were none to be found—not in stores, not in newspaper ads. The bike my parents and I finally found was second-hand and three sizes too big, just because FDR decided making war materiél was more important than manufacturing bikes for little girls too impatient to wait for WWII to be over.
"You have to come down if you want your stuff," Beatrice said. "There's termites under the building and I have to fumigate."
I can't remember what I stored with Beatrice while exiting Los Angeles for rural Kansas , but lately I've been missing certain photos, journals and scripts. In ‘04, I fled after 20 years of trying to make a career and happy love life. My friends begged me not to go:
"You're the last person in the world who should move to Kansas !" said my charming boss.
"One thing I'm hearing about where you're going...No available men," said my handsome therapist.
"You won't be able to find a job. People will see you as an outsider. Like when I moved to Florida ," said a well-meaning friend.
by Judith Fein
Yeah, life is a trip all right. A potentially life-altering trip.
A few hours ago, the sun was smiling on Santa Fe. We’ve had winds more vicious than dogs, white snow when purple lilacs should be blooming, sun, no sun, and today, sun again. The kind of sun that makes you fling open your front door, slide your tootsies into your tennis shoes, and hit the streets. Which is exactly what I did. You’ll see I am not kidding.
My husband Paul and I were walking downtown, past the Plaza, babbling about this and that and also that and this when suddenly I tripped over some dumb nib sticking up out of the sidewalk cement—obviously placed there by a jinn when I wasn’t looking. I flew up into the air, hit the curb, careened against the curb and landed about 12 feet from where I had taken to the air, Superwoman fashion. Paul, who normally has faster reflexes than a sprinter at the start of a race, just stood there, his jaw slack. Then he ran to help me up.
“Yes!” I screamed, stretching my arms skyward. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
I am sure Paul thought I had fallen on my head. He screwed up his face into a question mark.
Santa Fe to Tucson in a one-day mad dash
Jack the Pup is riding shotgun on the roommate’s lap as we head west on I-40 at nine AM, planning to reach my sister’s house in Tucson in time for dinner. The first miles across the desert, numbingly familiar by now, yield as this time we’d planned a back roads excursion south, just across the Arizona border. The map shows one of those intriguing dotted lines, a scenic highway, just what we need after hours of rumbling 18-wheelers…
To ready ourselves for adventure, we stop in Gallup at what is now our favorite eatery: Earl’s Family Restaurant. Here in Navajo Country Earl’s is shopping center, family reunion, and good staple New Mexico food: guacamole, burritos and so forth. Outside, Navajo craftspeople jam the sidewalk with their tables; inside, they patrol the aisles, silently holding out pins, bracelets, necklaces, and, in a departure from the usual, a pair of weird lamps, the ceramic bases coated with sand and then painted with iconic motifs. I’m charmed, I must buy at twenty dollars each, then wonder, too late, where in the world I’m going to put them….
I was in the library, looking at the fourteen-day books, when I suddenly stared in amazement. There, on the shelf, was one of my novels, A Woman Walking. Stunned to see it in the section with well-known authors, I picked it up.
French Camp Failure
by Jules Older
As Effin and I left Vermont for French Immersion Camp in Quebec, I felt scared.
I had reason for fear. I nearly flunked French in high school. I did flunk Latin, got a D in German, just squeaked by Spanish. I kept switching languages in the forlorn hope I'd find one I was good at. I never did.
by Judith Fein
I live in Santa Fe, the City Different. It’s a town with a tap dancing rabbi, a stock broker who runs the community theatre, a real estate broker who moonlights by teaching cooking classes, legions of natives who protect the prairie dogs with their lives, a car that drives around with a suitcase on the roof to remind people that they have emotional baggage, tricked out lowriders, a Jewish mariachi, dead trees turned into sculptures of archangels, a judge who banged down his gavel and sentenced wrong-doers to bring a holiday turkey to court.
It should come as no surprise that this holiday season is replete with soul, spirit and a lot of quirk.
A few days ago, the Chabad rabbi, who is never seen in public without his black suit, black hat and pronounced beard, performed a little birthday party for the sun on the central Plaza.
Vegas On The Cheap
by Jules Older
With the possible exception of myself, I don’t know a cheaper sonofagun than Charlie Leocha. It’s no coincidence that we’re both writers — a notoriously underpaid gang of rogues who survive on free lunches. Wanna meet a writer? Wait by the food table at any press conference. The first ones there – plates in hand, pockets bulging — that’s us.
Last October I found myself in Rosemary Beach, Florida, and while I was there heard that this was Karl Rove's new hometown. Forget Texas and DC - one of the most influential political operatives of the last decade lived in a million dollar home in this upscale New Urbanist community on Florida's Emerald Coast.
Train travel is becoming, rapidly, as comfortable as an old shoe, and it takes the elegance of Union Station in Washington to remind me of the miracle of this way of moving along the ground.
But first, we stand for a long time in freezing drizzle in the Amtrak station in Richmond, modernized to dreariness, although the old photographs on the walls of the waiting room attest to the day when this was a major terminus. In those decades, eighty or more years ago, three train tracks crossed here, bearing engines and their massive loads, human and material, north, south and west. During the War, as my a historical Richmond grandmother called it, a major Union objective was to choke off these rail lines that were carrying supplies to the beleaguered Confederacy. All that is reduced to a shadow, now; only a few travelers wait to board when the train crawls in from Newport News.
The roommate and I are growing particular. The bedroom I reserved, which seemed so well appointed on the leg from Florida to Richmond, now promises to be horribly cramped. We try, at the ticket window in Union Station, to upgrade—in airline lingo—to a bedroom, which has actual beds and a bathroom, but the additional cost would be almost a thousand dollars, out of reach for nearly everyone traveling by rail. These bedrooms remain mostly empty, and it seems to me that Amtrak might reconsider what they are charging.
Skiing and Me
by Jules Older
Growing up in 1950’s Baltimore, outside of movies, I’d never seen a ski.
When I left for college, in cold and mysterious Vermont, my mother’s friend gave me a pair from her college days. They were ancient even by 1958 standards: taller than an NBA center, primitive beartrap bindings and lacking that newfangled invention, steel edges.
But they were mine. And I was heading for the snow.
In the diner car somewhere in Georgia, Keith, the kindly, amused and amusing steward, explains the exigencies of Amtrak, under funded, according to Jimmie, the sleeping car porter, since its inception.
“Did they get rid of your chefs?” I ask Keith, having heard on an earlier east-west trip that chef losing had been one of Amtrak’s attempts at economy.
“Not our chefs but our chef’s helpers, the ones who used to make salads, things like that, and wash dishes, the same time they got rid of china and glasses and linen table clothes. Now we just wash the wine glasses and the knives and forks and throw everything else away—a big waste,” he adds, before I can comment on the vast bags of non-recycled trash the new system must produce.
I commiserate before going back to the dinner menu.
“I recommend the steak,” the big, brightly colored and adorned woman next to me says with authority. The steak is amply promoted on the menu, its description outclassing the chicken, pasta and seafood, so I order it and it is delicious, as well as free. Our first class tickets entitle us to three meals a day.
My seatmate is traveling from Miami to her home in New Jersey. She speaks with a familiar accent. When the roommate who refuses to bow to political correctness asks her if she’s from Mexico, she replies with a flash of pride, “Cuba”.
I still like to go back to England where I spent the first fifteen years of my life. Every visit reminds me of where I am from. London is not where I was born - Wolverhampton is - but I think of it as my home town and I think of myself not as an ex-pat but as a native who happens to live somewhere else. I love the city's vibe. There is always something new, creative and hip that co-exists with the historic and anachronistic. It's a great mix. There are, however, times -- such as the night I spent at Claridge's, the grande dame of posh hotels in London - when I can't decide whether life is better for a contemporary American or a Brit from another century. 
While London certainly has its share of five-star hotels, few can claim as much old world charm as Claridge's, built in 1898. From the doorman's tip of a hat for the ladies to the Art Nouveau and Art Deco décor, the hotel is redolent of good manners and a gentler age. Concessions to the 21st century include permitting cell phones and cigars in the lobby where the walls are lined with black and white photographs of British royalty and ours -- Jackie Kennedy in evening gown and tiara. What caught my eye though was an elevator called the Ladies Lift located near a discreet, side entrance to the hotel.
Water droplets beat against the bedroom window, which framed a gray sky that poured all day into the evening. But the smell of hot butter browning in a skillet and the buoyant sound of trumpets and keyboard from the radio lifted my mood. I’ve only experienced Mardi Gras through weekend parades leading up to Fat Tuesday. But not the evening often touted on the news as an occasion of unabashed revelry and regrettable drunkenness.
“This must be a nostalgic time for you, isn’t it?” I asked my boyfriend Charles while he browned the French toast in a melted layer of what he calls “fake butter,” a cholesterol-free alternative to butter that I try to keep in his fridge should we decide to treat ourselves to a heavier brunch. I thought he was going to reminisce about stumbling out of the Napoleon House after having had too many beers or talk about the things he and his high school buddies did to get girls to catch their beads.
But instead, he prepared for Fat Tuesday as though it were Christmas. Reminding me weeks in advance to keep the evening free. Pulling out plastic beads to wear to work or offer his daughters. Interspersing the weekends before Mardi Gras with meals containing some variation of grits and cheese, a heavy cream sauce, and way too much butter for the sensibilities of a girl who practiced portion control with a kitchen scale. His shameless use of animal fat was both horrifying and endearing. If a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, he reciprocated by spending equal time over the stove to cook his way to mine.
Just south of Big Sur on California Highway 1, we hit the brakes when something akin to a 15-foot long slug caught our attention. Born and raised not far from the Pacific Ocean, I never saw such a creature on any California beach. It was 1997, my husband and I had been living in Santa Fe for nine years, and we were on vacation in California. 
There were few legal places to pull our rental car off the highway, so we broke some likely vehicle code and parked as close as possible to this giant slug sunning on the beach. As we neared the beast we heard from the crashing shoreline something that sounded like a Harley Davidson revving its motor inside an empty warehouse.
“Did we just enter the twilight zone?” I asked my husband. We paced through the ranchland grasses west toward the beach. Eerie noises seeped between the fog and sand, and more slug-like creatures appeared.
“What are they?” we simultaneously questioned each other.
by Andrea Gross
My four-year-old neighbor, a cute kid with the nicely old-fashioned name of Billy, knocks on my door. "Wanna see what Mommy gave me?"
"Sure," I say. (His mother is looking across the yard to make sure her child has safely navigated the few feet of space between our front doors. Can't be too careful these days.)
Billy is carrying a huge box, nearly as big as he is. He hands it to me, I wave to his mother, and we go into my living room.
He unpacks the box. "It catches 'terrists,'" he tells me. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature airport security check point station. I kid you not.
It has seven parts: a baggage x-ray machine, a people metal-detector, three plastic people, a rolling carry-on suitcase that fits in the x-ray machine, and a chair for the person who watches the suitcase in the x-ray machine. The people consist of the following: a traveler, a TSA agent, and a policeman with a gun.
The possibilities for creative play are obviously endless. Traveler tackles policeman. TSA agent gets trapped in metal detector. Policeman shoots x-ray machine. Child has nightmares.... (All people are white and male, but that's a discussion for another time.)
In Madrid, thieves work in pairs. One tells you that a bird has soiled your jacket and offers to clean it. The other slips it off and rubs a spot. When they helps you on with your jacket, your wallet is gone and so are the scam artists. In the Caribbean, some street moneychangers deftly fold paper money so that unsuspecting travelers can’t see that they’re counting the same bills twice. The skills of pickpockets on Rome’s trolleys are legendary. 
I’ve listened to many travelers recount such tales of their mishaps. Of course, I sympathized, positive that no similar fate would befall me. I prided myself on taking precautions and always being aware of my surroundings.
At the National Museum of Prague, as I was paying for a book in the gift shop, the lights suddenly went out. The old castle was all confusion as people milled about in the dark. Several minutes later, when the electricity came on, I discovered that my wallet had disappeared.
My husband and I reported the theft to the police. They seemed uninterested. We returned to our hotel and the manager helped us to notify our credit card companies. That’s when I realized that my husband and I shouldn’t have been carrying the same bank and credit cards. We had to put a hold on all of them. Now neither of us had access to credit, and between us we had little more than two hundred dollars in cash. I wondered how long it would take for relatives to wire funds. The answer was never. We were traveling through three countries, staying at a different hotel almost every night. Under the circumstances, no hotel would accept a wire.