SOLTuesday: Getting Out of the Cold

I’m packing today for a trip tomorrow.

            I never understood why older people became snowbirds, going south in the winter. Then, the winter my husband died, New York City’s cold weather became harder for me to take. The wind off of the river up my street felt colder. Was it just that I was older? Or because I had no one to hold hands with as we walked up the street? I’ve never liked winter weather anyway.

            I decided to start taking short trips to warmer places. I don’t want to leave the city for months at a time—there’s too much happening here that I don’t want to miss. But a few weeks away is a nice

Kailua tree, 2017

Beach near Mazatlan, 2018

break from the cold.

            In 2017, I visited one friend in Hawaii for a while, and another in central California, where I also was able to see my brother and one of my nephews.

            In 2018, I visited a friend who was herself a snowbird in Mexico with her partner—and she apologized the whole week for the colder than usual temperature. (And about the same temperature as back home!) Then I went on to New Orleans, for my first time in that city.

            In 2019, I went to Alabama. I had a friend who’d moved to Mobile when she got a job teaching almost 15 years earlier. (She arrived just in time to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Katrina.) I’d promised to visit, but this was the first time I actually did. Then I moved on to Montgomery and visited Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial. These were extremely moving places to see, and I strongly Civil Rights Institute. I happened to be in that city on President’s Day and found a Not My President’s Day demonstration there; maybe there were a couple of dozen people, and I got into conversation with one woman and we went to lunch and then I got a personal tour of the city. Traveling is such fun.

Civil Rights Institute, 2019

recommend everyone go there. And then I was on to Birmingham, to the

            This year, I’m off to Southern California. First, Los Angeles, where I have a college friend I will have dinner with, and another nephew, who I’ll also have dinner with along with my brother driving down from San Jose. Then on to San Diego, where I have another old friend, as well as a friend of hers who’s become my Facebook friend and who I will now meet IRL.

            I’m grateful I have the means to take these trips and the free time. 

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SOLTuesday: Traveling, Movie-Going, and Not Quite Getting Lost in Hawaii

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            Two weeks ago I flew to Hawaii to get away from New York City’s cold weather. The two Tuesdays I was there, I went to the movies.

            The Doris Duke Theater at the Honolulu Academy of Art was showing the three sets of Oscar-nominated shorts – live action, documentary, and animation – and that first Tuesday my friend and I went to see the live action shorts. I wrote a Slice about the film I liked the best, Enemies Within, last week, but it doesn’t seem to be available online, and neither are Timecode, a peek into the secret dancing life of parking garage security guards in Spain, or Silent Nights, about a volunteer working with immigrants in Copenhagen who falls in love with one of them, without knowing all the facts of his life. The winner, Sing, can be watched here.  And The Woman and the High-speed Train, a fable about a baker in Switzerland who waves to the train that passes her house every day for 30 years and begins to correspond with the conductor, can be purchased for $2.99 on iTunes.

            The following Tuesday I saw Hidden Figures, which I loved and now have the book to see what else I can learn about these remarkable women.

            This film I went to on my own. I had no problem finding the mall theater, but returning, I took one wrong turn after another. The first time I turned right instead of left, and almost immediately knew it was wrong. But the highway here was two lanes with no place to pull over and make a U-turn. I had to go more than a mile before the next intersection, where I could get turned around. But then there was the three-highway crossing, and again, I followed the wrong signs. It took me a bit longer to realize I was on the wrong highway, and again, I had to travel almost 10 miles before I reached a turning point.

            Oahu is divided by a range of volcanic mountains; the friend I was staying with and the mall showing Hidden Figures  were on the windward side, while Honolulu is on the leeward side. When I reached the long tunnel going through the mountains, I knew I was on my way to Honolulu. Eventually, I reached an intersection and could get back to the other side and the town of Kailua.  And I was passing beautiful vistas, which, since I was driving, I couldn’t take pictures of.

            The whole enterprise made me rethink the value of letting Google Maps tell me how to get from one strange place to another, and I used it on my new iPhone a few days later when I had to get to the airport with my rental car. Hurray for technology!