The organizers of Sacred Heart High School’s 50th Class Reunion had cleverly provided, in place of name tags, yearbook photos. As one remarked, it was a 60s version of the aging app. I will not comment on the relative kindness of time delivered upon those yearbook faces I observed that night, but I will say with certainty that the promise, hope, determination and fortitude shown in those class photos had not been dimmed by time. At least not over the course of this evening.

   You can’t beat getting yourself acclimated to the potential of the fall rainsweep of England, Scotland and Wales than by settling in to an old fashioned New England nor’easter. Since Carol took charge of the accommodations for this trip, we were confirmed in an upscale Atlantic beach inn outside Boston, complete with gas fireplace and a picture window view of the ocean delivering the three day blow.

  Although I have a colonoscopy every, er, ten years as recommended (in case my doctor may be reading this) the sense of dread that decennial event conjures is a most familiar one. It matches exactly, for instance, the same dread I feel about going to a museum. In fact, the prep for a colonoscopy may actually be somewhat less dreadful, in that there is considerably more sitting done than you get to do at a typical museum.

   I like wine. I like to drink it; I don’t need to understand why I like to drink it, but I’ve learned in the past few years that a lot of livelihoods depend on me wanting to know why. So when I travel to California’s wine country, which has become an annual event to visit friends, I include a winery tour, not so much for the sake of those livelihoods,  but for the same reason people who travel to New York and Paris visit MOMA and the Louvre: to advance their knowledge of art and culture sufficient to become annoying at parties.

   The giant Sequoia known as General Sherman that stands in California’s Sequoia National Park is more than 2000 years old. It is 1000 years younger than the oldest known Sequoia. Interestingly, these forest giants require wildfires in order to germinate their seeds and grow new trees. In other words, these living trees have been around for at least 3000 years, and have survived through the life giving natural occurrence of forest fires. Today, thanks to the human encroachment of creeping suburbia, forest fires are suddenly  now a scourge that have to be dealt with – to read between the lines of the lumber industry  – by clearcutting, of course.

   I was reading a travel narrative, and the writer used a word that struck me in an epiphanal way. Theroux was describing his coastal tour of Britain (The Kingdom by the Sea) as “long coastal stretches of decrepitude.”

   That I wanted Carol and I to see what he was writing about on our own upcoming trip (“…what had been villages well served by railway lines had become curiously anorexic-looking and tumble down, somehow deserving the epitaph from ‘Ozymandias.'”) struck me as very odd: I wanted to sightsee. As I read on (“defunct viaducts, abandoned cuttings, former railway stations, ruined railway bridges) it occurred to me Theroux was describing what 1500 years from now would be the ancient ruins of a then former world empire. The funny thing is the current existing sites of 1500 year-old ruins hold no interest for me. In fact little is more boring than a well-preserved and properly docented or audiophoned historic pile of slave-constructed rocks, except for maybe the section of medieval religious paintings in a typical European art museum.

Commenting on one of my blogs, a reader suggested I needed more friends. I replied that I have many friends, it’s just that they’re imaginary. As for real flesh and blood friends, I’ve taken Jiminy Cricket’s advice my whole life: “Books are your friends, my friend.”

The clue that my calculations on the day were significantly off was when we walked passed a parking lot snug against the San Ysidro border station. Carol wanted to show me Mexico, one country I had never visited before.

   It was my daughter, aged 14 at the time, who first pronounced Wrigley Field as unfit for human habitation. Never mind that the Friendly Confines is the second oldest in the majors, dating back to 1914 (Boston’s Fenway Park opened in 1912).

   “It smells like urine,” she sniffed, as she walked the concourse holding her nose.

   As the home of the Milwaukee Brewers has a retractable roof, there was no chance of a rain delay. We did, however, pick the very night again the home team chose to honor its newest inductees into its Wall of Honor. Since the Brewers’ former stars were always thorns in the side of the Cubs (or the White Sox when the Brew Crew was in the American League) I was not inclined to celebrate the likes of Ricky Weeks, J.J. Hardy or Trevor Hoffman.