Half-full

Busking at its best.  Although I do like Pike Place's piano man.

Itching

Each year of elementary school, the nurse would come talk about lice. Sometimes the class would have to file up one by one to have a comb run through our hair, just to make certain we weren't infected/infested.  Sometimes we just sat at our hinged desks, itching and hoping that it was just our imaginations.

In first grade, Tabitha got lice.  Tabitha was an intellectually disabled girl in my class, and her limited speech and ignorance to the incontrovertible social cues of 7-year olds made her a schoolyard target.  We saw, but did not understand, the filthy yellow dress and unkept hair, and so the sing-song insult "You like Tabitha" became the standard recess rebuttal.  It was a small cruelty, or rather a full-sized cruelty by small people.

No one was really surprised when the nurse's comb stopped at Tabitha.  She had to stay home from school for two weeks, which may have been a relief for her.    

Thinking about Tabitha makes my soul itch and hope it's just my imagination.

"To this Day" by Shane Koyczan

A Summer

34 States, 2 Provinces, 11,528 miles on the road, another 10,752 in the air.  A swan song for Petey, my  trusty steed over the past decade.

Cities
Savannah, GA
Portsmouth, NH
Bar Harbor, ME

Prettiest Regions
Southeast Tennessee
Northeast Coast
Western Louisiana
Kauai
Hill Country, TX
Prince Edward Island

Experiences
Kayaking the Napali Coast
Thunderstorm in the Chisos
Peter and the Starcatcher
Swamp Tour
Fireflies in Great Smoky Mountain National Park
Fenway Park

Wildlife Encounters
Bayou Otters
Sea Turtle

Food
The Wilkes House
Mahony's Po-Boy Shop- grilled shrim and fried-green tomatoes
Lobster Stew and popovers at Jordan Pond
Sushi in New Haven, CT
Chingones from the now-defunct shop

Books
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Help
Treasure Island
Anne of Green Gables
Sophie's World
Watership Down
1984

The Incredible Journey

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 “We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” –T.S. Eliot

Fenway

Road Trip, Week 6: New England and Newer England

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• Driving Tunes: Pretty much NPR and Canada's version of it
• Books: The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury, 1984 by George Orwell, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Mongomery
• Wildlife: Foxes, turtles, a raccoon, and buffalo (or bison to be more precise)
• Food: Garibaldi's pizza, amazing sushi with an even amazing-er menu, fish and chips, popovers, lobster stew, lobster omelette, lobster roll, chowdah, homemade blueberry ice cream, and a whoopie pie courtesy of the old lady bake sale  
• Sights that didn't quite make the blog: Star-lit Yale with my starlet friend, Portsmouth's pallet of wood-siding houses, Bar Harbor, the red dirt roads of Prince Edward Island, "Free camping in the Shire", massive fields of lupine, the Canadian perspective on the War of 1812, the Lake of Shining Waters
• Friends: Gabriel Jones, Jillian Taylor, Mickey Theis