There Was Also Joy

Pam and I spent four years living in the rural Bavarian countryside of Germany. She was working as a test director at a civilian aircraft maintenance facility just outside Ingolstadt, home of the Audi automobile plant. Bavaria was an amazing place to live. Great food, wonderful people, and a short drive to many wonderful areas. During our time in Germany we traveled extensively, driving the old, used Audi Coupe we bought into the ground. It’s a sad thing when the tow truck drivers at the German equivalent of AAA know you on a first-name basis… At the time I was writing an online wine and food column called Jim’s Kitchen for CompuServe’s Wine Forum. I focused in on pairing wine and food, and wrote about the various successes and failures. One year we decided to gather up some of our favorite recipes and interweave them with stories of some of our experiences. The end result: Unsere Vier Jahreszeiten in Deutchland , or, Our Four Years in Germany. The book went out to family and fr...

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.

Pam loved puzzles. No, I mean LOVED puzzles. Early in our marriage we used to spend hours working on large puzzles of outdoor vistas. I think we even knocked off a 10,000 piece monster of a view in the Italian Dolomites. We had at least 20 puzzles in the closet, including a several-thousand piece one of cheeses. Yes, cheese. She was from Wisconsin. You’d expect different because… ? Pam’s puzzle passion changed when we started having kids. Turns out having thousands of tiny cardboard pieces around drooly, grabby munchkins isn’t a recipe for a calm play time. So we traded those monsters in for kid-appropriate puzzles and continued on. We were always happy to find a vacation spot that had a pile of puzzles for us to play with. Not sure where Pam’s love of puzzles started, but I did find this great photo of her in her high school days…

August 6th, 1993. Pam and I had been apart for a year as I finished out the last year of my enlistment in the US Air Force. We'd waited a long time, roughly 18 months, and now the Big Day was finally here. We were married at my family's cabin on Echo Lake in California. It's a serene, beautiful place that's been in the family since my Grandpa Holmes secured a lease on the national forest land back in 1938. Somehow we ended up with a Scottish-themed wedding, although I recollect it was Pam's idea as a part of linking to my family's heritage. Pam's mom made her dress, and I'd ordered my kilt from a small shop in Edinburgh. (There's a good story for another time about me trying to work through comprehension of a thick brogue over the phone.) We had 25 people at our ceremony, including the photographer and the bag piper. Today I'm sitting on the balcony at our home, doing some writing and a lot of reminiscing. It was a beautiful day all those...

For those of you who knew Pam: Duh. For those who didn't: This is her natural, happiest state: surrounded by pets. Yes, yes, yes, she loved people, but her bond with pets was just incredibly deep. When I met her she had two cats: Carmen and Little. 22 years later when we moved from Ohio to Oregon we took two old cats, two one-year old kittens, and two 13-year old dogs. Yes, that's six pets. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are several photos: Pam with Ed the cat, Grace, and Gus Pam with Bugsy, her office mate Napping with Bugsy and Grace A lap full of kittens

Neither Pam nor I have been fans of heights. Despite a love of mountains and hiking, we weren’t the kind who enjoyed scampering along narrow trails at the edge of a cliff. Neither of us were incapacitated by heights, but the feeling was far past mere discomfort. During out time in southern Germany (Pam was assigned to a NATO aircraft modification plant in Bavaria from 1995 to 1998) we took a number of vacation trips to Tiers, Italy. Tiers is right in the middle of the glorious Südtirol region, and is chock full of great hiking and climbing trails. During one of our trips Pam thought we should drive to one of the ski lifts and hop a ride to mid-way up the Rosengarten ridgeline. We’d save a couple hours of hiking and get to the most beautiful part of the trail straight away. We parked our car at the lift’s parking lot and walked up to the base of the ski lift. We paid for the ride, then were directed around a corner to the entry point for the lift. We rounded the corner and ran in ...