Hiatus

While it might seem to you that I’ve simply once again failed to post anything new for a month, I’m actually on a hiatus that I’m just now getting around to announcing. I’ve taken on a book-editing project for a friend that is commanding all the time that I might otherwise be spending writing blog posts. Or rather, that I might otherwise be spending thinking about writing blog posts, without actually doing so very often. As is my wont.

I want to make this clear so that no one thinks I’m dead or, more likely, that I’m being even lazier than usual. In fact, given the fact that I’ve been working on this editing gig (for real money, too), I’ve actually been less lazy that usual.

 

Anyway, before I disappear from this space for what easily could be another month or more, I’d like to survey a few things that have been going on.

One of those things is winter, a season that I genuinely like and will deeply miss when global warming renders it climatically meaningless, but that this year doesn’t know when to stop. (I see no contradiction there, by the way: As we say in the meteorology business, climate change Fucks Things Up.)

I’m off from work today, and this morning I spent at least 10 minutes layering myself in three pairs of thermals before driving into the District for a run. While necessary and effective, such laborious dressing is supremely annoying. I love the way Nat King Cole sang the word “eskEEmos” in his classic version of “The Christmas Song,” but I do not personally enjoy dressing up like an Eskimo. If I did, I would move to Nunavut. All that padding makes me feel like the Michelin Man when I’m running. Also, when I have to pee it takes a seeming eternity just to find and extract the source of the urge.

There’s been much to-do this winter, all across the country, about the polar vortex. Which allegedly is a longtime weather term that hadn’t ever really applied to conditions in the United States until this winter, but which I suspect was simply made up by the PR team that came up with the film The Matrix because it sounded fiendishly awesome. In the DC area, what the polar vortex has meant is that since December we’ve experienced far more teens and single-digit temperatures, wind chills of zero and below, and snowfalls of varying depths than we usually do. It’ll get seasonably warm or better for a few days, and people will walk around in shorts and T-shirts in the 45- or 50-degree weather just because they nominally can, although it’s premature and frankly kind of stupid. However briefly, hope prevails over reason. But then the mercury plummets once again, as a new wave of Canadian air proclaims, “Not so fast, hosers!”

Today is the last day of February. Spring is imminent and consistently warmer temperatures are inevitable. Baseball spring training games already have begun in Florida and Arizona. Soon enough, the dog will be panting and Lynn and I will be complaining about how hot it is, given this region’s tendency to go from spring moderation to summer heat in the span of a week or two. But at this point I have to say enough already. I don’t look good in knit hats. Also, in the car,  my CDs skip unless I give them an intense massage. I look forward to the days soon when I consistently can go hatless, when my car CD player doesn’t skip through a four-minute song in 30 seconds, and when I can urinate without first needing to dig around in my pants as if they were an excavation site.

So, what else is going on? The Oscars.

The Academy Awards are coming up Sunday night. Parenthetically, March 2 also will be my dad’s 86th birthday, but I’m guessing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will not award him a public service statuette for a lifetime of infrequent movie-going, not to mention his utter distaste for the sex, violence and vulgarity that are Hollywood’s wheelhouse.

I’ve seen most of the nine films nominated for Best Picture, quite a few of the nominated acting performances, and, this year, even all the nominated short documentaries. This afternoon, I plan to take in the nominated short features, as well, which are playing on one bill at a DC theater. The only awards about which I have really strong preferences are Best Picture and Best Actor. I’d love to see 12 Years a Slave win because it’s the best rebuttal I’ve ever seen to those who romanticize the Old South, fly the Stars and Bars, and argue that those who fought for the Confederacy should be honored for defending Dixie's way of life from Yankee aggression. It’s a brilliantly conceived and acted film, and it's incredibly hard to watch. As it should be. My Best Actor nod, meanwhile, goes to Matthew McConaughey, for both his outstanding work in Dallas Buyers Club and for making a bona fide thespian of himself after years of dicking around in unchallenging pretty-boy roles.

I have to give a shout out to West End Cinemas in DC. It’s an aesthically dumpy complex of three theaters, with tiny screens and uncomfortable chairs. But West End’s  taste in film selection is outstanding, and I’ve spent many happy afternoon hours there over the past year. Most recently, that’s where I caught the Oscar-nominated short documentaries, which run the gamut from the reconciliation of a gay man and the ex-skinhead who nearly beat him to death, to a profile of a dying inmate in hospice care at a maximum-security prison. Another of the short documentaries showcases the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor, an improbably optimistic one-time concert pianist who still was feeling joy at the keyboard at age 109. She was in the news this week upon her death at 110.

Polar vortex, the Oscars … February also has been about the Winter Olympics, continuing horrors in Syria, and upheaval and instability in Ukraine (which now  joins seemingly two-thirds of the world in those categories).

All I can think to say about the recently concluded Olympics are these things: 1) Sochi was an asinine place to hold the games both climatically and in terms of lending Vladimir Putin unearned legitimacy. 2) I found it difficult to get excited about competitions in which undetectable nanoseconds separated winners from losers. 3) I really liked, however, a line I heard somewhere, with reference to the biathlon, that for the next four years now, anyone seen skiing and shooting a rifle at the same time again simply will be known as a crazy person.

I must confess that I also enjoyed the dredging up of the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan knee-bashing incident upon that Olympic circus’s 20th anniversary. Tonya Harding is such a tragic figure—her own worst enemy, whose sad upbringing seemingly preordained her current state of denial. She says she’s happy now as a wife, mother and landscaper. That seems unlikely, given that her double chins shake with ill-contained fury at the ways she insists she’s been wronged by the press. But for her sake, I kind of hope so. Nancy Kerrigan achieved Olympic glory and seems to bear her former rival no ill will, to her great credit. But you wonder whether Tonya Harding ever will subdue her demons.

Ukraine? The economy’s in freefall, and disunity between its nationalist east and Russia-loving west threaten to rip the nation asunder. Syria is a humanitarian apocalypse, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, unspeakable violence continues unabated under the world’s radar in countries from Congo to Sudan to North Korea to Mexico. In South America, Rio de Janeiro is preparing for an Olympics for which it seems economically ill-suited by bulldozing its slums and leaving homeless its poorest citizens.

Wow, I am all over the place, literally and figuratively, in this post! All I meant to do was announce a blogging hiatus. It seems that I should add thanks that my biggest personal complaint is a transitory cold snap.

When I next post, the weather is sure to be warmer, but the world’s problems are just as certain to unchanged. It’s enough to make you want to huddle under a comforter, whatever the outdoor temperature.

Dental Dilemma

Everyone over the age of 40 likely has uttered the sentence “I’m too old for this” many times. At 55, I feel that I’m far too old for any number of things. The problem, however, is that most of those things aren’t going away anytime soon.

Take working for a living. Please! as the late comic Henny Youngman used to say, except that he was saying it about his wife. (Quick aside: As young reporter, I once covered an event that featured Youngman as guest entertainer. Somewhere in our attic there’s a black-and-white photo of the two of us, taken by my newspaper’s photographer. Henny is poised to play his trademark violin, and I seem to remember he’d just made a joke at my expense that had cracked up the furniture-industry executives he’d been paid to amuse.)

Anyway, take working for a living. I’ve been doing it for 33 years now, and I have to say, enough’s enough. That’s a huge chunk of my waking hours spent doing things other than pretty much nothing, which is the way I’d vastly prefer to be spending that time. And holding down a job necessitates many other things for which I feel too old, such as donning business-casual clothes at a pre-dawn hour five days a week, enduring tailgaters on two-lane MacArthur Boulevard because they’re late for work at Sibley Hospital, dealing with coworkers who are even more socially awkward than I am, being forced to adapt to technological changes in the workplace, et cetera and so on.

But there’s one thing for which I’ve long felt too old that I easily could do something about, except that I am a coward. That something is coming clean with my dental team on flossing. Specifically, on the fact that I’ve never flossed my teeth and I have no intention ever of doing so.

When I was a kid, flossing wasn’t even a thing. I went to this awesome dentist in Summit, New Jersey, named Dr Hill who’d been my dad’s dentist forever—since long before he married my mom. Dr Hill was a highly successful and incredibly dapper African American man at a time—this was the 1960s—when kids like me who grew up on suburban cul-de-sacs didn’t see many black men, period, let alone urbane black men who played the horses and sometimes sported a checkered vest and jaunty cap.

Dr Hill never mentioned flossing. He asked me about school and kickball and my life in general, and he displayed that classic dentist’s ability to understand my responses even when my mouth was open and filled with logs of cotton. (Were those part of the cleaning or the drilling process? I can’t remember anymore. In those days when water was unfluoridated and Rice Krinkles were my go-to breakfast cereal, I always had multiple cavities.) I loved Dr Hill.

Our family dentist in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we moved when I was 14, may have mentioned flossing to me, but that was the 1970s, and I had one hand, and the nascent disability empowerment movement hadn’t yet turned its attention to the inalienable right of every American, regardless of hand number, to floss his or her teeth. I don’t know if a device yet existed at that time to facilitate one-handed flossing, but if it did, my dentist didn’t know about it. As I recall, his aged hygienist laboriously flossed my teeth, then looked pityingly at me, as if to say, “Plaque may overtake your mouth and your gums may succumb to disease most foul in the months before you next see me, but there’s not a thing anyone can do about that, you sad, crippled son of a bitch.”

I think it was when I was living in neighboring High Point in the 1980s, working for the newspaper there, that my dentist and/or hygienist began telling me of the existence of a contraption I could hold in my one hand that would allow me to floss my own teeth. I of course had no intention of doing so, because a) it struck me as tedious thing to spend one’s time doing and b) I saw absolutely no evidence that my mouth was going to hell. I mean, the water was fluoridated by then, I was eating better and brushing nightly (whether my teeth needed it or not), and my cavities now were few and far between. Sure, my gums bled during those in-office flossings, but so what? They bled at no other times. Because I never flossed!

My next longtime dentist was Dr Schatz, a wonderful man who already was approximately 112 years old when I became his patient after moving to DC more than 20 years ago. He’d been Lynn’s dentist, and possibly Woodrow Wilson’s as well. His cramped office smelled like 1940, he kept his World War II uniform hung on a doorknob near the desk where Mrs Schatz served as scheduler when she wasn’t serving as hygienist, and he bragged that the Smithsonian had expressed interest in someday buying his dental equipment. Needless to say, the Schatzes didn’t nag me at all about flossing. Oh, they thought it was a good idea, but they knew that Woodrow Wilson hadn’t died of dental disease and that failure to floss wasn’t the end of the world. (Nor, for that matter, had it been the reason the League of Nations hadn’t worked out.)

But then there was this, too. As sweet and kind as the Schatzes were, their views of people with physical challenges weren’t exactly enlightened. I’m not making this up: Mrs Schatz once told Lynn how sad she was for her that I’d never be able to hold her in a two-handed embrace. I believe the Schatzes admired Lynn all the more for her stoicism in the face of such stunted marital intimacy. At any rate, what I’m trying to say is that I’m pretty sure they assumed I was incapable of flossing my own teeth.

Time ultimately waits for no dentist, however, and several years ago Dr Schatz finally retired. (I don’t know if the Smithsonian’s Division of Dental Antiquities ever got a hold of his equipment.) Making the transition to modern dentistry after all those years in the Eisenhower era was a shock to the system in more ways than one. This new office had computer monitors and kept electronic dental records. My new dentist ministered to my teeth from a sitting position—Dr Schatz hadn’t even had a chair. The office atmosphere was antiseptically professional, with no QVC-purchased dancing Santa Clauses on display, no mounds of moldering paperwork piled on the front desk, no ancient volume of Who’s Who in Dentistry sitting in the lobby bookmarked to the practice owner’s page.

I missed those personal touches, and the pure camp of biannual time travel, but I quickly saw the wisdom of entrusting my teeth to a team whose mental and physical faculties weren’t fading, whose professional knowledge was up to date, and whose database made unnecessary my bringing in a filled-out insurance form every time. The thing that bothered me from the get-go, however, was the staff’s insistence on—and assumption of—flossing.

This new hygienist always commented on my bleeding gums and gently urged me to do a better job of flossing, being of a modern mindset that assumed not only that was capable of it, but that I surely must be doing it (if inadequately), because who doesn’t floss in an age when its benefits are so well known?

For the first couple of years, I simply nodded at the sagacity of the hygienist’s advice, content to tacitly lie each time. Eventually, however, this recurrent bit of theater started feeling stale to me. It dawned on me that, hey, “I’m in my 50s and, yes, I'm too old for this!” Why was I engaging in this constant charade? Why was I blandly accepting the container of floss that always accompanied the new toothbrush and mini-tube of toothpaste in my parting “goody bag”?

Why could I not look that earnest hygienist squarely in the eye and simply say, “No disrespect, but I do not floss, and I frankly never will. I know you’re just doing your job and looking out for my optimal dental health, but I feel I’ve aged out of this conversation. I should very much like never to have it again.”

Or, since that would be a lot to verbiage to remember, why couldn’t I at least say, “I hope you won’t take offense, but I don’t floss and don’t plan to. My gums have lasted this long. I’ll take my chances.”

Since making this mental declaration of independence, however, I’ve never been able to make it a verbal, audible one. My most recent checkup and teeth-cleaning was a few weeks ago. I’d been pretty sure this was going to be the time I’d finally make my Flossing Speech. In fact, I’d envisioned a blog post in which I proudly told the story about how I’d kicked flossing tyranny in the ass. (And although I shouldn’t say so, my current hygienist has a substantial one.)

But damn if I just couldn’t do it! Again, as if we’d never had the conversation, she commented on my bleeding gums and urged me to be more diligent about flossing. I so wanted to tell her there can be no diligence where there is no effort or interest in the first place. But those words would not escape my lips. Once again, as I’d done so many times before, I meekly confirmed the wisdom of her advice with a solemn nod that suggested I’d get right on it. I hated myself a little as I climbed into my car.

When I got to the office that morning (it had been an 8 am appointment), I decided I’d seek counsel on the Internet. Surely I’m not the only flossing holdout, I reasoned. I’d do a few minutes of searching and find out how others go about expressing their defiance to their dentist’s offices. (And also, whether there are any consequences. I mean, is it a firing offense? Do some dentists tell noncompliant patients to take their grubby mouths elsewhere? Would I need to shop for a new provider?)

To my great surprise, however, no search combination I entered yielded a single fellow flossing foe. Not “refuse to floss.” Not “won’t floss.” Not “proudly united against flossing.” Nothing! When I Googled the search term “no flossing,” all I found was WebMD’s well-meaning but thoroughly unhelpful guide, “Flossing Teeth: No More Excuses!” Among other things, it hails “floss-holders”—the very device that has been suggested for the one-handed among us.

Where, I wanted to know, was the document titled, “Flossing Teeth: No Excuse for Extending This Ridiculous Charade. Here’s How to Stop the Madness”?

So, I don’t know if refusal to floss is the very last societal protest that lacks an advocacy group, or if I’m the last non-flossing dental patient in these United States, or what. All I know is that I feel entirely too old to continue playing this game, yet I'm too damn much of a wuss to put an end to it.

Christmas Exposed

It’s five days till Christmas, so I sort of feel like I should write something about the holiday. But I’ve also got a dead pornographer and naked chests on my mind as I settle for a one full, glorious week off from work.

So, first, Christmas. When I was driving home from my run in DC this morning, I passed one of the saddest snowmen I’ve ever seen. We’d recently had one of those typical Washington area winter-weather situations in which multiple inches of snow had been predicted but we ended up getting just slightly more than enough of the white stuff to cover the grass. It’s almost all gone at this point, and in fact the mercury is expected to rise to 70 degrees this weekend. But kids will be kids, and apparently one local child was determined to make a snowman or snowperson even if he/she had to use every snowflake in the yard to do so, and even though the location beside a busy road ensured that said snow-being soon would look as pristine as did coastal New York after Hurricane Sandy.

By this morning, the imagined child’s loving rendering—gleefully conceived on a day when local schools had been closed—stood forlornly, half-melted and brown-black, in the middle of an utterly snowless lawn. It was sort of like seeing the before and immediately after photos of that handsome Russian ballet director who’d had acid thrown on his face—or revisiting one’s tidy, well-kept childhood neighborhood and finding nothing but rubble and crack houses.

Why am I opening a discussion of Christmas with that image? I don’t know. I’m not a Christmas hater, and in fact I love Christmas music, and sending out cards, and that spiked eggnog the liquor stores sell at this time of year. (Note to self: A weekend trip to the liquor store is a must.) And snowmen aren’t so much a Christmas thing as they are a winter thing, although it’s not technically winter until tomorrow.

But, that sad snowman somehow was a reminder, to me, of the mixed bag that is The Holidays. Last night Lynn and I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV for perhaps the 10,000th time. Alone among seasonal telecasts, that particular special never gets old for me. It speaks so poignantly to the ambivalence that I think most of us, in the West at least, have toward the contradictory crazy quilt of commercialism and generosity, of secularism and religion, that is Christmas. Sure, A Charlie Brown Christmas ends up coming down on the side of Christianity, but to my mind in a way that’s more hopeful than it is convincing. I’ve read a biography of Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown’s creator, and it’s clear that he was a conflicted and in many ways an unhappy man. In his Christmastime fable, with its less-than-reverent jazz score, Linus ultimately delivers to the sad-sack kid the savior that Charles/Charlie wishes he felt in his heart.

 

That’s my armchair analysis, anyway. Which is worth at least Lucy-the-Entrepreneur-Shrink’s five cents.

Christmas. There’s a lot to like about it, and a lot that’s problematic. Mostly, it’ll never again be as good for us as adults as it was when we were kids and it meant that anything was possible, including Santa. Come to think of it, that may be why spiked eggnog is so very attractive to me now.

So, let’s move on to the dead pornographer. I’m an aficionado of obituaries that are well-written and that truly seem to capture the essence of the deceased, for good or ill. Yesterday I happened to come across the New York Times’ recap of the vulgarly picaresque life of Al Goldstein, a native son best known as the publisher of Screw, a skin magazine that was, by all accounts, exactly as subtle and classy as its name suggested. Goldstein died in Brooklyn of renal failure at age 77.

I write “by all accounts” because I never actually saw a copy of Screw, which debuted in 1968, when I was 10 years old, and had ceased publication by the time I might have researched it on the web, solely in the interest of journalistic science. But here’s how the noted civil liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz, who sometimes represented Goldstein in the latter’s legal tussles, described Screw in the New York Times obituary: “Hefner did it with taste. Goldstein’s contribution is to be utterly tasteless.”

Elsewhere in the piece, its author, Andy Newman writes, “Sex as depicted in Screw was seldom pretty, romantic or even sexy. It was, primarily, a business, with consumers and suppliers like any other.” Indeed, Newman adds, “The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue was succinct: ‘We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ. We will apologize for nothing.'”

As you might imagine, the obituary isn’t exactly a celebration of a redeeming life well-lived. In fact, it makes abundantly clear that the ugliness of Screw reflected that of its creator, who didn’t even describe himself in flattering terms, choosing instead such adjectives as “infantile” and “compulsive.” (Clearly Goldstein would not have objected to “repulsive,” either, but, rather, would have worn it as a badge of dishonor.)

The obituary's writing is darkly masterful. Consider these two paragraphs, which capture Goldstein in a nutshell:

“Apart from Screw, Mr Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser who seemed to embody a moment in New York City’s cultural history: the sleaze and decay of Times Square in the 1960s and ’70s.

“A bundle of insatiable neuroses and appetites (he once weighed around 350 pounds), Mr Goldstein used and abused the bully pulpit of his magazine and, later, his late-night public-access cable show Midnight Blue, to curse his countless enemies, among them the Nixon administration, an Italian restaurant that omitted garlic from its spaghetti sauce, himself, and, most troubling to his own defenders, his own family.”

Much later in this tour-de-force biography—which prints out to four full pages, and which I urge you to seek out while it is still online if you appreciate great writing and have a reasonably strong stomach—Newman puts a fine point on that mention of “family” by recounting, “After his son, Jordan, disinvited him to his graduation from Harvard Law School, Mr Goldstein published doctored photos showing Jordan having sex with various men and with his own mother—Mr Goldstein’s third ex-wife, Gina.”

Not surprisingly, Goldstein’s final years, as chronicled by Newman, were as unpretty as had been his oeuvre. He was homeless for a time, and he spent his final years in a Brooklyn nursing home where, one gets the impression, he was not exactly besieged by well-wishers. His one late-life “highlight”? A Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Adult Video News Awards for his role in Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Are Screwed.

Yes, this was a sad, sad life. But it was one that Goldstein defiantly lived on his own terms, and that a New York Times writer has spun into bleak and darkly entertaining art. I’d heard of Al Goldstein before his death, but it’s only now that I feel I’ve truly experienced him. (Second note to self: While showering today, scrub particularly vigorously.)

Finally, my opening reference to naked chests has to do with an eye-catching headline earlier this week in my daily e-mail from Rolling Stone magazine: “Miley Cyrus Flashes Twitter to ‘Free the Nipple.’

Well, of course she does! was my first thought—given that the tediously rebelling former Disney Good Girl always is in some state of public undress or self-conscious outrageousness. The only question in my mind was whether “Flashes Twitter” was a reference to the social-networking tool or whether “Twitter” now has become a descriptor of an intimate female body part.

It turned out, however, that Cyrus had bared her breasts in support of an upcoming film called Free the Nipple that is part of a wider if loosely-organized campaign to give women the legal right to go topless in public, just like men can. Actually, apparently it’s not technically illegal in most states for women to go topless, but it’s nearly impossible to do so in most places without getting arrested on some charge or another. This even is so in New York City, where female toplessness has been legal since 1992—an abuse of law enforcement that no doubt made Al Goldstein apoplectic.

Did you know there’s even a “Go Topless Day,” which annually is observed on the Sunday nearest to Women’s Equality Day (August 26th) and is the creation of a group led (per Wikipedia) by “former French auto-racing journalist Claude Vorilhon, currently known as Rael, spiritual leader of the Raelian Movement, a UFO religion”? I discovered this in my own research (you’re welcome). Presumably Miley, the Nipples filmmaker and other toplessness advocates would consider association with whack-job fringe groups antithetical to their mammary-liberation efforts.

Anyway, you might think that, as a heterosexual male, I’d be all for women having the freedom to wave their unfettered breasts in my face should they so choose. But that is decidedly not the case. I actually, totally agree that it’s a horribly unfair societal double standard for men to be allowed to walk around shirtless on a hot summer day while women’s breasts must swelter underneath their bras. But my solution to this inequity is to make men put their shirts on.

I hate seeing guys walk around topless. And it’s not because I’m latently gay and plagued by temptation, although I’m certain Al Goldstein would’ve depicted me that way in compromising doctored photos had I ever crossed him in any way. It’s just that it really doesn’t seem fair to women.

And, OK, it’s also that I don’t want to see the exposed chests of flabby guys. (I’m reminded of a great New Yorker cartoon in which a bartender at a beachfront watering hole tells a male patron that the T-shirt he’s holding in his hand is courtesy of the woman at the end of the bar.)  Furthermore, I don’t want to see the exposed chests of ripped guys, either. They’re just showing off. And also feeding my insecurity about my own un-taut upper torso. I don’t need that.

As far as I’m concerned, guys should put their shirts on. And women should keep theirs on. I mean, let’s face it: Most people, regardless of gender, look better clad than unclad. (I certainly include myself in that number.) And here’s where I will speak as a heterosexual guy: There’s something to be said for a bit of suggestiveness and mystery. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Now, how do I bring this post full circle and tie these disparate elements together?

Ah, I’ve got it. That Rolling Stone item about Miley Cyrus noted, “On Saturday, she tweeted an almost topless selfie featuring two strategically placed hearts that read ‘Merry Christmas.’”

Again, this holiday truly is a mixed bag.

 

Maui

Hawaii’s legislature approved gay marriage and the state’s governor signed it into law while Lynn and I were vacationing on Maui earlier this month. I’m not saying my wearing a Human Rights Campaign tank top one morning was the difference maker, but you must concede that it’s a pretty big coincidence.

At any rate, that’s my segue into an account of our historic trip, during which I added Hawaii to my “running states” list, we (atypically for an Abbott-Ries vacation) encountered no cold weather save at 10,000-plus feet, and Lynn actually wore a bathing suit—any of those things being so notable as perhaps to have made the national news. (So, please excuse me if I repeat things you may already have read in print or online in the New York Times or the Washington Post, or which may have been Tweeted or re-Tweeted to you.)

There’s a lot of ground to cover—literally, since Hawaii insists on being something like 4800 miles away from the DC area. Let’s break it down by sections. And no, I’m not starting with the scenery. Which was spectacular, but I’ll get to that.

The Flights

All told, we spent something like 18 to 20 hours in the air, with brief layovers in Los Angeles on the way and San Francisco coming back. I was deeply concerned for Lynn, given that the concept of multi-ton vehicles defying gravity always has unnerved her, and also because her history of having drowning nightmares seemed ill-suited to soaring high above thousands of miles of water. She was determined, however, to self-affirm rather than self-medicate, telling herself that she no longer was that petrified person fatalistically awaiting the Final Splashdown. And by God, it worked.

It undoubtedly helped that we had movies to distract us. Lynn had figured out how to rent and download films onto our computer, and we ended up watching three of them. The best was Sound City, ex-Nirvana and current Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl’s affectionate look at a legendary California recording studio, its pioneering Neve soundboard, and the good old days of pre-digital recording, when you actually had to have some talent in order to be a rock or pop star. It’s kind of hard to focus on dying in a plane crash when you’re hearing the likes of Grohl, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks reminisce and play their music. And, of course, we were among the choir members to whom Grohl was preaching his “everything was better before technology ate the world” message. (Even though, admittedly, we were watching the flick on an iPad, with our iPhones in our pockets. We never said we were entirely consistent.)

We also read on the flights. During the course of our vacation I started and finished Richard Ford’s Canada, which I loved, and which I urge you to read if you like spare and somber stories about young boys whose lives are forever altered by their parents’ poor decisions and the violence that’s always just a few missteps away from what otherwise might have been a happy childhood. Trust me, it’s a great book. And it’s set in Montana and Saskatchewan—the kinds of cold, underpopulated, scantily touristed places to which Lynn and I more typically travel. Anyway, I recently read a Q&A in the New York Times in which Amy Tan called Canada her favorite book of 2013, although it actually was published in 2012. I’ve never read a word of Amy Tan’s writing, but she’s an acclaimed bestselling author, so maybe you’ll take her word if not mine.

So, where was I? Oh yes, very slowly getting to Maui, the putative subject at hand. Lynn brought food on the planes, so we also spent part of our time eating Tofurky sandwiches and carrot sticks and pita chips with hummus. (In this diet we somehow seemed to be alone.) All that masticating was a welcome distraction from the fact that I felt so straitjacketed by our accommodations that at times I wished I’d been born without legs rather than half of an arm. Count me among those who are delighted that public sentiment seems to be firmly against the airlines allowing people to take and make in-flight phone calls on their cell phones. I fear that no amount of faux meat or diverting documentaries could quell my impulse to throttle such self-important bloviators.

A TSA employee had been murdered by a crazed gunman at the Los Angeles airport just days before we touched down there, prompting me to note that “LAX” is not the ideal identifier for a transportation hub whose security has been fatally breached. Still, we ultimately arrived in Kahului, Maui, without incident either in the air or on the ground, except for that thing where I felt I’d been stuffed into a tiny packing box for a good chunk of an entire day.

The airport in Kahului is relatively small and easily manageable. But I’d thought that someone was supposed to adorn us with leis as we de-boarded onto Hawaiian soil (or carpet, technically). I mean, I’d seen such welcomings depicted by reputable news sources such as an old Brady Bunch episode. Alas, however, no leis. Maybe you need to be on a Hawaiian airliner instead of United. Or perhaps the whole “I got lei’d!” joke simply has gotten so old and stale at this point that nobody has the heart anymore to provoke it.

The Runs

I suppose I should’ve renamed this section. To be clear, while Lynn did contract a cold late in our time on Maui, our stools were utterly unaffected by the change of scenery and climates.
 
As I’d noted in an earlier post, probably the biggest reason we headed to Hawaii was because I have this goal of completing at least one uninterrupted run of an hour’s duration in each of the 50 states, and Hawaii was the farthest-flung of the 18 states I still needed. (Why the island of Maui, as opposed to, say, Oahu? Because Lynn wanted to attend a two-day workshop there that was being led by a renowned Reiki master. And because we didn’t give much of a crap about seeing the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, or Waikiki Beach, or any of the other big Hawaii tourist sites. Which, by the way, appalled my mom. “But, you’re going all that way!” she cried out on the phone when I announced there would be no island-hopping. Sorry, mom.)

We spent our first night on Maui at a hotel in Kahului, which I consistently called “Babalui,” in a totally hilarious spin on the name of fictional bandleader Ricky Ricardo’s biggest hit from the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Oddly, Lynn consistently found this not even slightly funny. Kahului is where the airport and a lot of retail shopping is located, so it’s un-pretty by Maui standards. But it’s hardly without its charms. And by that I don’t just mean the charms of the Whole Foods where we ate or purchased several meals at the beginning and end of our vacation, but also of the majestic hills beyond the Whole Foods shopping center, the palm trees and tropical flowers all around town, and the shoreline rife with surfers. (Even on one stretch that’s across the bay from a container yard for cargo ships.)

Our first morning on the island, Friday the 8th, I acted on  tip from the hotel’s front desk and ran beside a busy road for about a mile, then up a side road into a city park. (Turning the corner, I passed the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, which was heavily promoting an upcoming performance by 1970s hitmaker Boz Scaggs. This gave me a pretty good idea of your concert-going horizons when you’re situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and don’t live in a major population center like Honolulu.) As I ran through the park, I was struck, as one often is in far-off locales, by the clear disconnect between local perceptions of the weather and one’s own. Even just past sunrise, the temperature was in the low 80s, the humidity was moderate to high, and the expected tropical breezes were nowhere to be felt. I basically was sweating my ass off, yet a number of the Mauians I saw running or strolling by had track suits on—and seemed quite comfortable, at that.

I’d been hoping the park was going to be sprawling and lush, but it was small and utilitarian. It didn’t take me long to circle the baseball field, basketball courts and parking lots, so I proceeded up a hill and into a neighborhood of modest homes, zigging and zagging along until I’d killed enough time to be able to head back to the hotel. It wasn’t exactly like the evocative runs I’d had in such otherworldly places as Iceland and northern Newfoundland, but it was good enough to earn me, at 7:35 am local time, the right to cross Hawaii off my running list as state number 33.

Afterward, Lynn and I walked over to Whole Foods for a celebratory tour of the breakfast bar, with its many vegetarian and vegan offerings. No one congratulated me or vied to pick up my bill. But then, most things travel slowly on the islands. Including news.

My runs on mornings two and three were in Hana, which is about 50 miles east of Kahului via the grandiosely named “Highway to Hana”—a two-lane road that’s frequently so narrow you must stop to let opposing traffic pass. (More on that road in the “Scenery” section.) In terms of commercial activity, Hana is the anti-Kahului. The retail touchstone of the crossroads that qualifies as “downtown” is the ramshackle Hasegawa General Store, which sells everything from beer to bolts. There’s a lone restaurant, a gas station and, a slight distance up a side road, a smaller grocery store and a post office. Nearby are two churches and a resort hotel that was far too expensive for us, so I got even by trespassing on its grounds during both of my Hana runs.

There’s not a lot of traffic in Hana at any time, at least not in November, and certainly not before 8 am. Which was good, because the dearth of road choices forced me to run beside the aforementioned “highway” for stretches. The vegetation was lush—lots of palm trees and tropical plants whose names I don’t know—and the terrain was much more densely forested than I’d had any idea Maui would be. The first morning in Hana I checked out the town beach, which is black-sand, well-shaded and host to very rough waves—all of which combines to make the place a little foreboding. The second morning I ran down a back road to the combination high school-elementary school, which is low-slung, old and dated, but features colorful murals on the cinderblock walls of heroic Hawaiian figures in native dress. I saw and heard a lot of wild chickens, which you see all over the island. Most of the few people I passed on the streets said hello or good morning, which doesn’t happen much at home.

No run on morning four on Maui, because we wanted to be atop the Haleakala volcano before every other tourist on the island had the opportunity to join us there, and it was a two-hour drive away. Our ultimate destination that day was Lahaina, which is on the west coast, is a port for cruise ships, and was an adjustment for us after two full days in sleepy Hana.

I beat most of the tourists outside on morning five, however, and started my Lahaina run at the massive banyan tree next to our hotel, which swallows an entire square block of real estate. From there, I headed away from the commercial center, across a highway that was busy even at 7 am, and up a hill in search of the “L” sign I’d seen when Lynn and I were out walking the previous afternoon. It was as if the town had wanted to emulate Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign but couldn’t afford all the letters. I wanted to see what the L looked like up close. But I never could find a road that would take me to it. I hit multiple dead ends and ended up passing a lot of kids waiting for school busses and residents of low-end apartment complexes heading off to work. Running back toward the hotel, I saw a Kaiser Permanente health care facility and thought about how, while I always carry my driver’s license so authorities can identify my body should I be hit by a car or keel over, my Kaiser card remained in my wallet back at the hotel. Fortunately, I didn’t need it.

When I finished my run at the banyan tree, tourists already were lining up at the waterfront for day excursions, and breakfasters were filling the streets. I was happy not to have had to share the roads with many of them.

Morning six was our last on Maui, and we were back at our original hotel in Kahului. This time I decided not to turn off at the road that led to the park, but rather to just keep going up the busy four-lane road that later narrowed to two. The shoulder was plenty wide at all points, and I had the bay to my left on the way back, but it wasn’t exactly a Chamber of Commerce-friendly route. I ran up a hill and past an array of forlorn shops and small businesses. What was interesting to me, though, were the number of bars, restaurants and dedicated spaces offering karaoke, which I knew from having been there is huge in Japan. As I’d seen in Tokyo, there even were karaoke-specific rental spaces. I wondered if Hawaiians sing better than I do (well, that’s almost a given), and exactly how much spiked Hawaiian punch fuels these parties and open-mic competitions.

The Scenery

OK, all right, already. If you haven’t ever been to Maui/Hawaii, what you probably wanted to know from the get-go was, exactly how gorgeous is it? The answer is “extremely,” but I’ve been stalling—in part because I wanted to address other things first (and it’s my blog), but also because I have a lousy descriptive vocabulary and there’s really no way I can do the island justice.

It would help if I knew how to add photos to this blog, which probably isn’t that difficult to do. But I’m lazy, and, anyway, I sort of dig how this space is so low-tech as to be, to modern-day branding, as the 8-track tape is to the iPod. Also, Lynn shot down the idea of my posting here the link to an online album of our collective photos. She told me she didn’t want “the whole world” seeing them. Meaning, given the size of my readership, that she apparently deems Earth’s population to be about a dozen people. I personally think it’s because Lynn fears those bathing suit shots of her somehow will go viral, perhaps on the website “Pasty-White Visions,” if there is such a place. If you aren’t some cyber-rascal looking to embarrass the missus, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll give you the link. Pending spousal approval, of course.

Anyway, the scenery. Well, let’s first consider the previously mentioned highway to Hana, which for about 30 of its miles twists, turns, peaks and valleys, through and around and beside some of the most amazing forests and stretches of coastline I wager you’ll ever see. There are overlooks and pullovers where you can stop and take pictures of waterfalls and exotic foliage and waves crashing against rocks. That’s why—with all the stops, slowdowns at one-lane bridges, and hairpin turns—you really can’t drive from Kahului to Hana in less than three hours.

I shot my only iPhone video—it’s seven seconds long and opens with a great shot of my hand—at the site of an apparent memorial among the rocks at ocean’s edge. It features two crosses and a surfboard. It’s starkly beautiful. I assume it means a surfer died there, but I suppose it could’ve been left by one of the Beach Boys or the Ventures, in loving memory of those heady days when surf music sold lots of records.

Lynn’s workshop was at the home of this big-name Reiki guy who lives just outside Hana. We’d taken a test drive over there on the afternoon before it started to ensure we could find the place—street signs on Maui being a hit-or-miss proposition. (GPS won’t work in Hana, not that we had any such device.) We were glad we’d previewed the trip, because the guy’s half-mile-long “driveway” actually is two ruts with raised mounds of tall grass in between. We were driving a tin-can Mazda 2, which has the horsepower of, well, a horse, and about two inches of ground clearance. At least that was what it felt like as we climbed the hill to the house for the first time. I pictured us trying to explain to the Hertz people at the airport why we had no muffler and our undercarriage appeared to be on a vegetarian diet.

But the payoff was arriving at the extraordinary modernist house and looking down on the countryside and the sea. If you should end up seeing our photos, there are some great ones Lynn took while she was on the premises.

Lynn’s workshop was all day both days, so I used that time to do some exploring. The first day I drove southeast about 15 miles (which again, took longer than you’d think), past the coastal entrance (as opposed to the volcano entrance) to Haleakala National Park. Again, it was beautiful. Lush. Exotic. Other descriptive adjectives. I then drove back to our rental cabin, donned my bathing suit and bodysurfed the waves for about an hour at Hamoa Beach, which is hidden from the roadway—down a flight of stone steps. It was lovely and peaceful, and there were only a few people there. The fancy-pants hotel has a cabana at Hamoa, next to the dingy public restroom. The friendly cabana attendant introduced me to his pit bull and let me rinse my sandy feet at the hotel’s spigot.

The second day of Lynn’s workshop, I drove back to the national park. This time I stayed, and took a two-mile hike to the Waimoku waterfall. The path up a gradual incline takes you across cascading streams and through primordial bamboo forests. At times I was all alone, standing in near-darkness at midday within the tight canopy, with a breeze on my face and the sounds of creaking bamboo all around me. It was amazing. And the waterfall was breathtaking. I took a “selfie” there, which I later sent to friends captioned “Sweaty Geezer Achieves Goal.”

After that I drove a few miles further away from Hana, in search of the burial place of Charles Lindbergh, which I knew from a guidebook was in the small cemetery of a church on a back road. Eventually I found it. Everything about the place is modest—the church, the cemetery, the simple plaque that reads “Charles A. Lindbergh. Born Michigan1902. Died Maui 1974. ‘If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uppermost parts of the sea … .” C.A.L.”  The verse is from the Bible—Psalm 139:9.

The simple graveyard is an incredibly peaceful place, and it’s abutted by a small public park on a bluff that overlooks some of the most striking ocean views I saw anywhere on the island. I don’t know nearly as much about Lindbergh as I should, given his outsized place in 20th century history as aviator hero, victim of a sensational crime, suspected Nazi sympathizer, and, finally, complex figure whose very name tends to divide those familiar with his legacy. But I know that he chose his burial site for its remoteness, beauty and quiet. He certainly got that right.

A different kind of beauty and calm awaited Lynn and me at the Haleakala summit, which was socked in by fog when we arrived by car late Monday morning, November 11th. We couldn’t see the volcano crater down below, but it was an incredible feeling to be up among the clouds, wearing coats and bracing ourselves against cold winds and temperatures in the 40s when it was sunbathing weather 10,000 feet below us. We snapped shots of the fog-shrouded rocks and scrub vegetation, and we took each other’s picture at the elevation sign. Then we proceeded on from chilly and quiet Haleakala to sultry, bustling Lahaina.

Though it’s touristy and coastal, Lahaina hardly is Myrtle Beach or Ocean City. The retail elements are tastefully laid out along a couple of main roads. It’s compact and walkable. There’s that huge banyan tree, and an abundance of trees and flowers. The sunrises and sunsets over the water are beautiful. We in no way felt we were ending our wondrous journey around the island by staying at a glorified mall.

I do wish I’d made it up closer to that “L,” though. Which the Internet tells me stands for Lahainaluna (“overlooking Lahaina”) High School, is 30 feet high, and sits at the 2,000-foot level of Mt Ball in the West Maui Mountains. It’s been there since 1904, which means it predated the Hollywood sign by 19 years.

The Accommodations

Lynn had done all of our lodgings research. Our top criteria were location (near the airport coming and going, near Lynn’s Reiki training in Hana, and one night in happenin’ Lahaina), cost (ideally under $200 a night), and fairly basic amenities such as WiFi access and perhaps a pool. In each case our expectations were far exceeded.

The Maui Seaside Hotel in Kahului, just two miles from the airport, met not only all our criteria for convenience (it also is within easy walking distance of the Whole Foods I’d mentioned earlier), but it also has a beautiful central courtyard with a manicured lawn, views of the bay and a spacious pool that descends to a depth of seven feet. The water was cold, and Lynn would not join me. (This would be a theme throughout our trip.) My presence in the pool proved sufficient to frighten off most would-be bathers, which was great. More room for me to propel myself underwater from one end of the pool to the other, a feat I always deem impressive in pools of a decent size, although I’m still awaiting the oohs and ahhs of onlookers after all these decades.

Returning to the Maui Seaside for our final night on the island felt like being embraced by an old friend. We even were upgraded to a bigger room at no extra cost for a reason I can’t recall. Maybe it was an overdue reward for my ability to hold my breath for an entire pool’s length.

After our arrival night in Kahului, we spent the next three nights in our own cottage in Hana. This was fantastic because it was private, gave us our own kitchen, living room and screened-in front porch, and was very near both “downtown” Hana and the home of Lynn’s Reki master, who had recommended the place in the literature he’d sent his students. My gratitude may in retrospect have been the reason I never once in conversation with Lynn referred to the Reiki guy—one William Lee Rand—as “David Lee Roth,” even though assigning him the name of the one-time Van Halen frontman would have been at least as hilarious as was the Kahalui-Babalui thing.

Really, it was so much fun to go off for the day—Lynn to Reiki, me to my hiking, swimming and sightseeing adventures—and to feel as if we literally were coming home. The cottage was perfect for us, even though it had no air conditioning. Ceiling fans and cooler nighttime temperatures did the trick.

Our other hotel on Maui, for one night only, was the Pioneer Inn in Lahaina, which we’d already known from a black-and-white greeting card we’d seen for sale in the general store in Hana is old and historic—built in 1901 on what once was the personal taro patch of King Kamehameha the Great. It’s a grand structure sitting on prime turf right on the waterfront, with porches adjoining each room on its two-story entrance side, the requisite wooden sea captain out front, and an evocative palm tree-framed interior courtyard with a pool as its centerpiece. The place’s glory has faded a bit, to be honest, but then that’s probably why we could afford it. So what if there was chipping paint here and there, and our room overlooked a dumpster? We still loved being there, feeling that the old girl looked pretty good for 102, and that we’d been delighted to have made her acquaintance.

The Food

OK, I’ll start by saying that we got the owner of the restaurant at the Maui Seaside to bring us a sample of poi—because, “when in Hawaii” and all that. Poi, which, per Webster’s, is “a Hawaiian food of taro root cooked, pounded, and kneaded to a paste and often allowed to ferment” generally is eaten with meat. We could see why it’s not meant to stand alone. It has the consistency of applesauce but not the flavor—or really much flavor at all.

This is going to be a short section (thank God, you’re no doubt saying, if you’ve given up your afternoon to follow me this far), because you know that, as a vegetarian/vegan couple,  we didn’t seek out a luau and eat pig suspended from a spit, or order any seafood. We could’ve grabbed a fresh coconut or pineapple from one of any number of roadside vendors, but we didn’t feel moved to do that either. We did indulge in coconut shave ice in Lahaina, but God knows if there’s any real coconut in that. During our one morning in Lahaina, we had a fantastic breakfast at the imaginatively named Café Café, where Lynn had granola with fresh fruit and I had fresh fruit with chia seeds and Gobi berries. (Lynn took some up-close food-porn photos of those dishes, which are on the aforementioned online site.)

Mostly we ate at Whole Foods or ate items bought from there. We did dine at a couple of nice Thai restaurants—one in Lahaina and the other in Kahului. I scored some Tootsie Roll Pops at the general store in Hana to enjoy on the road in my rental car (and to convey to other tourists what a badass I am).

The Climate

You wouldn’t weather think conditions could vary much on an island that’s only 48 miles long and 26 miles wide as the crow flies. (No, I’m not sure if Maui has crows. But, whatever. “Straight shot.” You know what I mean.) The fact is, though, that it rained like crazy much of the time we were in Hana on the east coast, but hardly at all anywhere else. A lot of the Hana rains came overnight, which certainly was preferable to during the day, but they often were accompanied by howling winds that made things quite noisy—even over the sounds of our white-noise machines and the ceiling fans.

In the Hana area, swells of rain often would arrive without warning, alternating with sunshine. Fortuitously, my entire hike to and from the Waimoku waterfall was rain-free. But precipitation did force me to bag a planned second trip to Hamoa beach.

Temperatures consistently were in the low 80s during the day and the 70s overnight. Which usually was quite comfortable. Atop the Haleakala volcano at 10,000-plus feet above sea level, however, it was quite autumnal, weather-wise. As you might imagine. The temperature was around 50 and wind-chills were in the low 40s, I’d guess.

The Wildlife

We never encountered the state bird—the Nene (pronounced nay-nay), a type of goose—anywhere other than on signage that dutifully notes their relative rarity. But we did see, I determined after we’d gotten home, several mongooses. They’re long, brown and sleek, and they dart across the road. You know they’re not squirrels because there are no squirrels on Maui. I didn’t know what I’d been looking at until I searched “Maui wildlife” and saw a photograph that matched the animal I’d seen.

Hawaii also is big on wild chickens and feral cats, and we saw plenty of each. I’ve no idea if mongooses eat cats, but I’m sensing a natural population-control cycle there.

Our friend Joanne who once lived in Hawaii says everything is bigger there—the plants because of all the rain and the wildlife because of the climate, the abundance of habitat and the lack of predators in some cases. Certainly our cottage in Hana hosted one of the biggest spiders I’d ever seen (on the front porch) and a magnificently large snail (inching his or her way across our driveway.) Again, we have pictures.

What else? It wasn’t whale-watching season, so we didn’t seek out any cetaceans. We saw many, many varieties of colorful and cacophonous birds, but did we know what we were looking at? No.

The End

Even after a magnificent vacation, it was good to get back home to our untidy house and its shedding animals. And even to return to fall in the Mid-Atlantic, as the temperature at Dulles Airport was a brisk 25 degrees when our plane touched down just after 6 am on Thursday the 14th of November. We’d both taken the rest of the week off from work and so could luxuriate in the memories.

Maui wasn’t our usual type of vacation, but we had a blast there. Will we ever seek out another tropical locale, minus the lure of its being an un-trod running state or a Reiki destination? (Lynn, by the way, enjoyed her training and was glad she’d done it, but didn’t feel the Master was quite all that.)  It’s not out of the question. Although frankly I hear a lot of colder-weather “M” places calling our name—Manitoba, Minnesota, Montana, Michigan. We’ll see. But we no longer can rule out places just because they’re warm and popular.