by Gary | Feb 5, 2015 |
I lost a friend last week. No, it wasn’t a surprise. The tumors in his brain finally got the upper hand. The fact that I knew it was coming makes it no easier to accept. You can see from the title above that I still think of him in the present tense, and I suspect that I always will. That’s his character. Although I have known him for well over half my life, there are others who can give the particulars of his life, fully lived, far better than I. There have been times when I’ve not seen him for stretches of time, but when we reengage it’s as if I’ve seen him every day of my life. In many ways our lives seemed to take...
by Gary | Jan 28, 2015 |
If you are of a certain age, I bet I know the first thing that comes to mind when you see the word “Burma.” Be honest now, I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with Aung San Suu Kyi or the dreadful military tyrants that have had the country in lockdown for the last fifty years. Your first thought may go something like this: “Does your husband, Misbehave? Grunt and Grumble, Rant and Rave? Shoot the Brute…Some Burma Shave!” I know you wouldn’t remember the exact words of the doggerel but, more likely than not, you would have thought of Burma Shave. That’s about where I started out as...
by Gary | Jan 7, 2015 |
You may not know that S. and I just completed a ten day journey in Burma (as the US State Department insists on calling it) or Myanmar (as the rest of the world calls it). I can’t quite figure out why we insist on using something as arcane as naming conventions as a means of conducting foreign policy…remember ISIL vs. ISIS in another area of the world. Back to our journey. The first question that comes to mind when one discovers our travel intentions, is “why in the devil would anyone want to go to Burma.” Let me tell you now there are no crisp answers. In part, I guess, it’s because we haven’t been here before, part because...
