When a daughter recently announced that she was moving to the country from our favorite city, where I have always loved to travel, all I could think of was, “Never. Ever. Again.”

I used to love crossing this beautiful bridge into that beautiful city. However, since I did it for the first time fifty years, things have changed and so have I.

I remember crossing the Golden Gate when the toll was a quarter and a friendly custom was to pay for the car behind you.  I think now it costs about $6 and no one is paying for anyone else.

I am so looking forward to visiting her new place in her tiny new town (pop. 175) on the Russian River, nestled in a redwood forest, a mile or so upstream from the coast. No mail delivery.  She has a P.O. box here:

Gotta love a place where the P.O. conveniently shares its location with a confectionery.

As for me, this is just about the right amount of traffic:

That’s my long-time paddling companion Dave up ahead.  After we’d paddled 20 miles on Friday, I said I didn’t want to get into Friday evening traffic on the interstate on the way home.  Dave knows every country road in Western Oregon and promised he could lead me home on them all the way.  And he did.  Through beautiful woods and across Willamette Valley farms ready to be harvested.  Only hold up was a few minutes when we had to wait for a large farm vehicle to turn off.

I can remember the big piece-of-furniture radio that stood in Mama and Papa Harrison’s living room.

We sat around it and listened to a few minutes of the evening news or a bit of country music from “The Light Crust Dough Boys,”  and some really great “family” shows.  Actually, I believe they were all family shows. “Fibber Magee and Molly.”  “Baby Snooks.”

Daddy gave one like this Mother for a very special gift.

I remember lying on a chenille bedspread with her on hot summer afternoons and listening to short soap operas. I was about five, which means she was about twenty-five.  I can still hum some of their theme songs and commercial jingles. “Just Plain Bill.”  “Stella Dallas.” “Pepper Young’s Family” was a particular favorite.  And I wanted Ivory soap for my bath.  “So pure it floats.”   Still, does, I think.  Or “Camay, the soap of beautiful women.”

Later, when I was about ten years old, I got to keep that radio in my bedroom and I remember listening to some great “radio plays” as I was falling asleep.  “The First Nighter from the Little Theatre just off Times Square,”  starring Barbara Luddy and Olan Soule.

When I was in high school, I was the very proud owner of a transistor radio.  Way out in West Texas at night, we could pick up all the top songs from KOMA in Oklahoma City.  “Only the Lonely, dum dum dum dummy doo ah.”

Now, I really only listen to NPR.  In the car or on my laptop.

Yesterday we paddled a stretch on the river that we were sure we had done before but we could remember nothing about it.  Now we know that’s because there was absolutely nothing memorable about it.

At one point,  Dave did spot a magnificent eagle

And then, in that way he has, he paddled into an inlet to explore the tiny water wildlife.  He’s an old science teacher.  I paddled on ahead and over to the opposite bank to listen to the birds. Then I looked up just a bit, and there in the trees, not six feet from me, were two beautiful, perfectly camouflaged deer.  They thought if they did not move I couldn’t see them.  I thought if I didn’t move, they wouldn’t flee.  So we sat there for a long time not moving.  Their antlers were covered with velvet.  You’ll just have to imagine it.  No photography is allowed at such a moment.

One hardly knows how to think about the removal/destruction of  monuments honoring the Confederacy all across the South as well as the renaming of many things named for deceased slave holders.

I think of Sam Houston as a hero of the Alamo, but he owned slaves.  Should we rename the city of Houston?

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves.  Should we blast their images off Mount Rushmore?

Personally, I think that whole thing is pretty awful and It would be fine with me if we blasted it in toto.

As we raze many statues and memorials honoring the Confederacy, I think we should do something with bits of the rubble so, while we mourn this blotch on our history, we do not forget.  I liked seeing the pieces of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 buildings made into monuments in front of the new NATO center in Brussels.

Oklahoma, where I was born in 1943,  was not a state during the Civil War.  It was Indian Territory.  But for some reason which eludes me, Oklahoma has a very “southern” devotion.  “Whites” and Indians alike fought for the Confederacy, yet I never heard of anyone there who was a slave holder.  Everyone there at that time, and most people there now, were poor.  Even since the oil industry boom, there are a lot more oil field workers than there are Haliburtons.

But I digress.

One of my earliest memories of my childhood in Durant, Oklahoma, is of playing in front of the Bryan County courthouse just down the street from our  house and where my grandfather, a “Europeanized” Choctaw Indian in a necktie and suit, worked in the Land Office.

What I played around was this:

I never thought about what it was until recently.  I found these shots online;

Interesting that this memorial was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1917.  Oklahoma was a state by then.  One wonders who Julia Jackson was.  I imagine a group of “ladies” sitting in a parlor in white gloves and hats appropriating money for it.  I have every confidence that this particular monument will never be razed.

A vivid memory of my most recent visit to my birthplace was the prevalence of Confederate flags being displayed on the backs of pickup trucks. That terrifies me almost as much as the swastika tattoos sported by some folks in those parts.

This time of year, I always love remembering a wonderful trip I took to Italy in 2005.  It was my second time to Italy and, this time, I made a special point not to dash from place to place, trying to glance at everything, rather to linger and ponder special things.

In Florence,  I went alone late in the day and lay on the floor of the Baptistry and looked at the ceiling until it was too late to join my group for dinner.

In Venice, in the Academia, I sat on a step in front of Titian’s “Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple,” again missing dinner and the Peggy Guggenheim.

I took the vaporetto to Murano and spent most of a day finding just the right piece of glass to buy.

And in Rome, I stood in front of  “The School of Athens” with a college art student who said he could die happy now having seen it.

Lately, we’ve all been thinking about the tragic figure that is our current American president.  He is presently on a whirlwind world tour.  He is the most powerful man in the world, as people are fond of saying.  Yet, he will spend less than twelve hours in Rome. I doubt he will ever even realize that may well be the greatest tragedy of his shallow, superficial life.

I am very lucky:  I’ve checked off all the places on my bucket list, but there are definitely some places I would  return to again and again and again.  East Portal.  The Nile.  Florence, of course.  And Rome. By all means, Rome.