There Was Also Joy

Pam and I met lots of friends during out time in Anchorage. A few knew of our romance before I left the USAF and we married. ( We’d had to keep things secret before that.) I can’t even remember how we met Brad and Lana, only that we immediately became close, close friends. (The header photo on this blog is from a canoe trip we took together with them.) Brad and Lana came over to visit us while we were living in Germany. We took them lots of places during their visit, but high on our list was a trip to Tiers, a wonderful spot right in the middle of the beautiful Italian Dolomite mountains. Yes, the same spot with the terrifying ski lift I wrote about earlier . We stayed at the same penzione Pam had found a couple years earlier. It was a wonderful, amazing place that she’d stumbled across in some oddball travel book. Brad and Lana fit right in, and the stoic Gasthaus hostess immediately took them under her wing. Brad and Lana both came from farming backgrounds, and somehow that

Mid-life crises are A Thing. I hit my late 40s and decided to pick up guitar again after decades away from it. I played a bit in junior high, but was awful at it. I got the itch, so I went out and bought a $200 Fender D60 guitar, then took some classical guitar lessons. It scratched my itch and fulfilled my need for something new and interesting as I got near 50. A few years later we needed to replace our very aging, high mile Jeep Cherokee. Two small kids, lots of sports and other activities, so of course we started looking at SUVs and minivans. Because, well, practicality. One day I was working at home and my wife came in to tell me she’d found something she wanted to test drive. Pam always had far, far higher aspirations than I did. Why should her midlife crisis be any different? So we ended up with this.