Half-way In

This is to be a brief holiday ... plane ride was long but unevenful, though one of my fellow pilgrims (one of the young ones) was grossd out by my brushing my teeth in my seat after a mid-flight nap. I suppose that which is disturbing ("gross") to the young may lose its unsavory quality by the Last Quarter. So much fetid water passses over the dam by late life that a little mid-life teeth brushing carries little weight. M and I landed in Rome on Sunday and Monday were Vaticanized with a different group of Pilgrims. Our older son -- still a mid-3rd Quarter Player -- arranged for a guide, Angela ... the Art Historian. Angela is a proud Roman and very knowledgable both Theologically and Art-Historically. We should've been honored to be taken about by such a wise 40 year old ... and we were. But by day's end and after two trips up the Spanish Steps, M and I were both lame as a horse run hard enough for his final trip to the barn. Read the Rome Times: Old Well-Fed Couple Euthenized after Day in Vatican and walk about the Colliseum. Curious experience for me. In my faith tradition, prayer was typically done in modest venues. The smaller venue, the Sistine Chapel, and its big brother, St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican left me no place to meditate ... להתפלל ... to wonder at myself. Awe accrues to my experience with silent listening ... found it difficult to feel the wonder in such beautiful spaces. When M and I visited a Benedictine Monastery on Lake Magog in Quebec, there was space to experience the wonder and I suspect that I might have found the same in any of the 300 churches that Angela referenced in Rome. Ach du lieber ... we were tourists and not Pilgrims, after all. The Sistine Chapel did in a curious way remind me of our kitchen at home, the upper walls of which are covered in MY icons ... in pictures of my family, ... kids, grandkids and M and I, as we have aged with our progeny. Memories ... so much for me is about memories. It was about 45 years since M, I and the two older kids visited Italy ... and then only the North. The kids were 3 and 4 ... and M and I were kids, too. We stayed on Lago Maggiore ... a tidy little family in awe of the mountains up North ... dreaming and unaware of the life that would unfold or even about our youngest child and her 16 year old who were accompanying Grandma and Grandpa on this excursion. We hobbled out of Rome on Tuesday ... taking a train to Venice where M and I stayed back while 49/38/16 roamed the streets of Venice ... getting lost for a bit. They came back excited to find M and I beat and taking pain pilss for locked calves or calfs ... which is it? My own Mom and Dad would make a Hungarian dish called P'tcha ... made of calves' feet jelly. Our legs had, indeed, turned to P'tcha. This is, also, not a typical holiday for M and I. We most often find a place or go down to a place we own in a little backwater town in Virginia and gather our chairs to spend day after day on the beach. No problem finding that awe in God's backyard ... just in God's putative home. No. This trip is different ... few days in Rome ... now Venice ... then Florence and a brief meeting in Milan with someone who thinks about the spiritual side of depression. Then back home to where our Spirits really live. Sunday we go home and Monday I go back to greeting those who visit me in my office. Dear God: May I have the privilege to live long and prosper sufficiently to travel, again, with M and parts of our progeny.