Exploring Denver’s shops and restaurants, neighborhoods and people (including myself)
After the highways raised above the swamp, after the ragged trees, after Lake Pontchartrain pulled away to our right, we’ve reached hotel strip land.
Joy: My hair is curly in Louisiana.
The rooms face an interior courtyard, partly occupied by a CPR class. Each student, ensconced on the floor, has a device to keep her as far [...]
One thing the shopkeeper told me: an outdoor cat survives one to four years in the mountains of Colorado.
I believed him, having lost Rufus last year to the fox trotting through the park, or the pair of coyotes casing my yard early one morning, or a pack of raccoons. My neighbor cleaned up his guts [...]
The hallway ends at Dikeou. There among the art exhibits, with an audience of six, two poets fed off each other. And those who came to hear them. And those they admired.
Two giant pink bunnies deflate,
puddling onto the floor.
She asked him to recite “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died.”
He said he’d never been [...]
Denver’s Parade of Lights was quaint and small, as the woman from New York predicted. I liked her, but I liked the parade less, arrived late, couldn’t snap a picture without a quarter of some old woman’s head in it, couldn’t see the whole of the fairy-blue pirate ship. I chased it via the streets [...]
Yesterday, we traveled for 13 hours. The Sunday after Thanksgiving: in Denver and Chicago, new snow. Friends left behind, grading in Chattanooga; mother-in-law at one gate whom we couldn’t persuade to use our guest bedroom.
I’m on East Coast time now, detoxing from a week of southern food and wine.
And now my mind is muddled, can’t [...]
At Market Street Station, a fat, drunk, white man has passed out on one of the circular cement benches. A cop and an RTD guy stand over him, calling for detox. The cop coaxes the guy to sit up. Sitting behind him, I can see his butt crack.
The bus is late. I
wander around the [...]
It’s dark, except for lights sparkling on the river. I walk to the edge of the concrete plaza, where kayakers launch themselves into the Platte, and look down on … trash … or rocks. It’s too dark to tell.
REI is closed, and it may be dangerous to sit down here by myself, but I am [...]
I was listening to the Bruce Springsteen song from The Rising over and over today as I dusted.
When I was young, I wanted to leave my family, had to go as far away as possible. I was going to explore. Now I think of my thirty-year voluntary separation from them and wonder if it’s time [...]
Yesterday, when my husband told me his plans, I was reluctant to be left behind.
The plumes of fountain in City Park Lake shoot up and arch northwest, misting the paddle boaters far away. Trees wear their leaves around their feet, like a dancer who’s lost her slip but won’t stop dancing to hitch it up.
So [...]
I’ve been traveling in my head. One town after another along the coast of France. Diving kelp forests near San Diego. Into the forests of Congo, and then to a hospital where rape victims are being treated, where a mob forms.
But I’m not sure I’m that much of a hero.
Not a tourist either.
Some days, I’m [...]