Stories, truth, and 1918

I grew up believing my grandmother’s gradual decline in well-being was due to a series of mini-strokes over the last decade or so of her life. Tiny, broken branches, what you’d see if you looked straight up at what were once the colorful canopies of now-barren New England oaks and elms come November, is how I pictured the blood vessels in her brain.  Lots of sticks doing nothing and going nowhere.  

I suspect I internalized this image while listening to my mother, storyteller extraordinaire, fabulist of the highest order who never let a bunch of facts get in the way of dramatic retellings, share repeatedly the stories of my grandmother’s past. My mom had a gift. 

Perhaps to some folks, kids especially, the why’s behind the circumstances of an elderly relative’s failing health wouldn’t be all-consuming. I’m guessing lots of kids probably wouldn’t think twice about why their old people were falling apart – it’s what happens as you age, right? --  and maybe wouldn’t be too interested in the hows and whys of their elders’ early lives.  

But I was raised by my grandmother, so I always had questions. My mother was more than happy to answer, in story form. Per my mom, a proven unreliable though entertaining narrator, I spent more time with my grandmother during the first ten years of my life than I did with my own parents. Who knows how true that is. But it at least partially makes sense, given our living situation. 

Me, my grandmother, my parents, and baby sister all lived in the same three-decker. My mother and her siblings had grown up on the first floor. With marriage, her older siblings moved out to their own homes across the city and state. My mom, baby of the family, stayed close. After their nuptials, my parents could have easily moved to another part of the city or even to one of the nearby towns. Instead, they moved into the apartment right above my grandmother’s. 

My mother was a good Irish girl and good Irish girls put their mothers’ needs first, per my mom.  My grandmother lost her husband a few years before I came along and struggled mightily with loneliness and depression. She bribed my mom into attending college nearby, rather than take a full scholarship to the school in faraway Washington, DC that she had set her sights on, per mom. My birth, ten months after the wedding, filled a hole in my grandmother’s heart and gave her purpose, per mom. She took on the role of almost live-in nanny. She was always in our apartment. I was always in hers. We were close. This part I know for a fact is true. 

I don’t remember exactly when I realized that my grandmother was failing, but I recall that by the time we moved to a house across the city when I was in fifth grade, she shuffled rather than walked, mumbled in a language I couldn’t understand, said “eh?” a lot, and didn’t seem to comprehend my words. Her apartment was not as clean as it used to be. Her white hair, once pulled back tight, braided, and wrapped in a bun, hung in a barely-there loose knot, wisps and tendrils escaping everywhere. She once spent most of her time cooking, reading, going for walks. But by the time I hit the double digits, she could be found most days sitting on a chair on the back porch, one arm set on the railing edge, staring mutely across the backyard or into the darkness of the musty hallway. I can’t even begin to put into words what that was like as a little kid, watching the center of my universe slowly fade away. More on that another time, perhaps.

It was only a few years ago, after I became a grandmother myself, that my mother came clean about a lot of things, including that my grandmother had had Parkinson’s Disease, not a series of mini strokes. As far as we know, my grandmother is the only one in our family to have had Parkinson’s. 

The vaccine for the so-called (first documented US military cases were in the middle of the American heartland, on a base in Kansas) Spanish Flu of 1918 was the mitigating culprit, per my mom. She swore that my grandmother was vaccinated and was told in later years by a physician that one of the side effects was adult-onset Parkinson’s. At the time, I bought that story hook, line, sinker. It was only a few weeks ago that I learned that there was no vaccine at the time for that flu. I also learned that though scientists continue to investigate, they haven’t yet been able to draw a solid connection between the Spanish Flu and Parkinson’s. 

By 1918, my grandmother had been in the US perhaps a half dozen years and was likely closing in on her late twenties. A proud daughter of the hard mountains and rocky fields of the storied kingdom of Munster, Ireland, she was used to hard work. She supported herself by working as a maid during the day and improved herself by studying for her high school diploma at night. 

Her graduation class picture, which is printed on heavy white card stock, is dotted with the black and white photos of each of the eighteen grads. My grandmother’s oval portrait reveals a classic, young beauty of undeniable County Kerry lineage: unblemished skin, clear, deep-set eyes, rounded, high cheeks, prominent nose, shy, thin-lipped smile.  Her dark hair pulls back softly from her face and, following the fashion of the time, is held in place by a thin ribbon that matches the color of her unadorned, starched blouse, modestly buttoned to her collar bone. 

She looks healthy, sweet, and likely felt ready to take on the world. It’s also likely that she was temporarily thrown off course by the flu that year. I say this not because she developed Parkinson’s in her old age – the jury is still out on whether there is a correlation between the two, but because in 1918 the flu ravaged her city at the time, Holyoke, Massachusetts, along with most of the world. 

By October 1, 1918, which was the year she graduated Holyoke High School’s night program, more than 85,000 cases of Spanish Flu were reported throughout the Commonwealth, though some researchers posit that total infections were much higher because milder infections went unreported. 

Per Holyokecanaltour.org, annual mortality in that city more than doubled in 1918-19, rising from a base of 1,200 deaths per year to 2,500. The heaviest concentrations of fatalities were in the densely populated, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods were my grandmother and her friends likely lived. If my grandmother didn’t have the flu, at the very least she knew many people who did. I know of at least one of her dear friends who succumbed to the illness. 

Across the state, the statistics were devastating. Boston, an industrial giant and thriving seaport, reported two hundred deaths per day. Worcester, MA, the third largest city in New England at the time, estimated that one third of the population contracted the virus. This mirrored the rest of the country, which reported on average a 30 percent infection rate. (ForgottenNewEngland.com). 

Times were tough. Overseas, things were even worse. 

More to come. 

 

Love, loss, Veterans Day: The stories we tell

 Jefferson Mansfield Smith. 

That was the name of my maternal grandmother’s great first love, per my fractured childhood memories of my mother’s stories. As I got older and learned the truth about lots of family history, I also learned this: My mother and reality sometimes didn’t get along. I don’t think she was intentionally being dishonest. I think for her it was about telling a good story.  Why let the facts get in the way, right?

Because of one of her oft-told tales, I’ve always associated Jefferson Mansfield Smith, a soldier in the war to end all wars, with Veterans Day in general and my family in particular. I know very little about this triple-named gentleman. I’ve never seen his picture. Never learned how he and my grandmother met. Never once, while she was still alive heard her mention his name. I don’t really truly know the nature of their relationship. Yet, because of my mother’s stories, every November I think of him with a profound sense of sadness and I wonder about what could have been. 

My grandmother emigrated to the United States from Ireland sometime before World War 1. For years my mother insisted that my grandmother was only fourteen when she came here all alone. My mother and I would have intense, emotional discussions about how awful that must have been. We conjured up elaborate scenarios where my grandmother was wrenched from her parents’ arms while sobbing hysterically, clothing rendered to rags and all that, forced onto a rickety, leaking coffin ship, the stench of death everywhere.  We marveled that she survived the month-long crossing of the angry Atlantic, in the dark, dank, disease-riddled confine that was the steerage section. 

A couple of decades back, a cousin did some research, and we learned how mistaken we were. Our grandmother was probably in her early twenties when she emigrated, not barely a teen.  She traveled with a friend, not alone. By the time of my grandmother’s voyage, steerage, and the deaths and illnesses associated with it, was a thing of the past. My grandmother likely traveled in third class, in a dormitory-style cabin with bunkbeds. The trip was not cushy by any means, but also not the traumatic near-death experience my mother and I had called forth. 

By 1918, my grandmother had established a life for herself. She was working as a maid for a wealthy family in Holyoke, MA, a thriving industrial town teeming with Irish immigrants, in the western part of the state. That same year, she got her high school diploma from Holyoke High School’s evening program. That’s possibly where she met Jefferson Mansfield Smith, though we can’t be sure.  

According to my mother, Jefferson was one of my grandmother’s closest friends. As a child, I took that to mean they were secretly in love. Like all the physically able young men of his generation, Jefferson was called to serve his country. He was shipped to France in the last days of the war. The story goes that he died in the hell that was the bloody, blighted Argonne Forest a heart-breaking day -- minutes perhaps, before the Armistice was signed on the 11^th day of the 11^thmonth at the 11^th hour. 

Teaching kids about holidays can be challenging. Given the constraints of the curriculum, there’s never enough time to really get thorough and deep. Most kids I’ve met look at most school holidays simply as an opportunity to sleep in late and play on their phones all day. When it comes to days like Memorial Day and Veterans Day, this makes me uncomfortable, and I always tried to find ways to bring the reality of the reason for these holidays into the classroom. The themes of love and loss, the wouldas, couldas, shouldas of life, grab kids and hold them and make them think about things in new ways. 

I think that’s why I always told my students about Jefferson Mansfield Smith around Veterans Day and how his sacrifice in the brutality that was the Argonne Forest in 1918 changed everything for my grandmother, and, by extension, for me and my family.  

I’d set the stage by telling the students about my immigrant grandmother working as a maid and going to school at night, then mention her potentially romantic relationship with Jefferson Mansfield Smith, how he and all the young men his age went overseas to war, then about the heartbreaking timing of his heroic death. We’d discuss how the death of one person, one soldier can change everything. How, if he’d lived, perhaps my grandmother would have stayed in Holyoke, married at a younger age, had a dozen or more kids, like many of her friends. 

I explained how my grandmother eventually moved from Holyoke to another city. Time passed. She got older and resigned herself to the reality that she’d likely never marry, never have children. Then, in her late 30s, a decade after her young friend’s death, she found love once more, married, then miraculously had not one, not two, but four healthy children. 

But what about her friend who gave up everything for this patriotic crusade? What about his family? I’d tell them I didn’t know and sometimes we’d look him up online. We never found anything though. 

Even now, every November out of curiosity, I google the name “Jefferson Mansfield Smith.” Always nothing. No obituary notice, draft card, census entry, possible relatives. Nada. Zilch. It's depressing, how easy it is for humans beings to simply disappear. 

Sometimes I wonder if he ever really existed. I’d questioned my mother about this many times and she always swore that, as a girl, she remembered many family day trips to Holyoke, where she’d seen with her own eyes his name etched on the city’s World War 1 Memorial. Still, now, with all this modern technology, with so many infinite worlds of knowledge at our literal fingertips, why couldn’t I find his name?

Yesterday, finally, I did. 

More later.  

 

Bots are awful: Now my blog's hit 300K views. Ugh.

My blog – alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com, hit 300,000 views the other day. I’m not celebrating. I’m annoyed. Nope. Let’s call it what it is. I’m angry. 

Some background. 

I wrote my first blog post on July 29, 2012, more than fourteen years ago. Geez. Those were some tough times, but also truly some good old days. 

I’d just returned from a fantastic writing conference in Taos, NM and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, chomping at the bit, all the easy idioms. The writers I met with kept talking about the importance of honing your craft by writing every day. I pictured myself in an elegantly appointed bedroom, sitting at a fancy-pantsy Queen Anne-legged writing desk, re-arranging my voluminous satin skirts with ink-stained fingers. The only noise besides the scratch of my pen? The negative whoosh of snowflake dots outside hitting disks of snow. Ugh. The idea of writing in a vacuum, for nobody but myself, creeped me out. My interiority isn’t rich enough to sustain that life choice. Emily Dickinson I am not. 

I need occasional pats on the back, so starting a blog made sense. Publishing my work in a public blog form was a way to hold myself accountable. I didn’t care a ton about getting views – and to some extent I still don’t. I just wanted to make sure I wrote every day and wanted to set up a situation where I’d be successful. 

Over time, the viewing numbers for my blog started creeping up. Ten views here. Twenty views there. They started accumulating like empty candy wrappers the day after Halloween. Yes, I’m eating candy right now. Just finished a Twix. Working on a Snickers. Might have another Twix. Who knows. The night is young. 

Last year, on December 22, 2025, my blog views hit a whopping – for me – 75,000. I was over the moon Here’s the post I wrote on that: 

https://alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com/2025/12/happy-75k-to-me.html

That 75K mark seems to have set off some sort of tidal wave-type technological event. Within a few days, my blog views started jumping, bopping from a relatively sedate twenty -- thirty views a day to at times hundreds. By May 12, 2026, less than half a year after reaching that 75k, which I thought at the time was an insane mark, my blog hit the big 100K. Here’s the post I wrote on that: 

https://alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com/2026/05/100k-no-way.html

And then the really insane stuff kicked in.

Suddenly, my blog was infected or something, grabbing hundreds and hundreds of views per day. Yay, right? Nope. These weren’t/ aren’t “real” views. It’s easy to tell. The blogger dashboard is not super sophisticated. You don’t need to be a computer genius to figure out that most of the views from 75k on were not living, breathing humans. 

While I can never see  which individuals are looking at my work, I can see the anonymous number of views for the day, month, year, even total blog lifetime. I can see how many views per country for each of those time periods too. I can see which of my 212 posts were read and how many people read them. Up until last year, the number of individual views consistently matched the total amount for each day. Fifty views a day added up to fifty sets of human eyes, spread out over ten or so blog posts. This made sense. 

After I hit 75K, everything went nuts. For example, I’d see 450 total views for one day, but adding up the post-by post breakdown showed only 63 actual humans looked at my stuff. That’s a discrepancy of 387. That means on that particular day, my blog was “read” 387 times by bots. 

As the months passed by, the views continued to spike. Seriously, the daily view graph sometimes looked like an outline of the Himalayas. Now things are truly insane. My views for today stand at 4,635. But that number has no basis in reader reality. I know this because I can see that readers opened only twenty posts which in total have 35 views for today. That means my blog was hit by bots 4,600 times. 

So in other words, today my words and thoughts were stolen 4,600 times. Yesterday, bots stole from me almost 5,000 times. 

I am so angry about this. 

I like to write. I like to share what I write. Sometimes my writing is decent. Sometimes it’s horrible. Sometimes it’s meh. But I'm putting myself out there and doing it. These little acts of courage matter to me. And when I see that people read my writing, that makes me happy and motivates me to keep going. But this stealing thing? I hate it.

I’m in process of moving all my writing to Substack, which offers some protection against bots. I’m moving the good, the bad, even the embarrassing. So far, I’ve moved four pieces. In the last three days, they’ve gotten about eighty views total, peanuts compared to the close to 10,000 bot views my blog got the last two days on blogspot. 

Writing then publishing this stuff only to have it stolen/ mistreated by bots and by extension their creepy billionaire owners feels futile, like I’m emptying the ocean one handmade, fourteen carat gold, carefully curated teaspoon at a time while earthquakes keep knocking me down. 

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the bots catch up to Substack. They're taking over everything, it seems. 

Yet I’m not quite ready to quit. I still have lots to say. 

Forward. 

Now the daily views for today are up to 4,877. Ugh. I hate this. 

 

Splat: Comfort zones and the company we keep

Today after a workout at the local Orange Theory, a gym franchise that’s made a name for itself by offering stupidly tough, murderously intense interval training (HIIT) classes to obsessively athletic overachievers (I’m maybe exaggerating a little bit), I turned to the woman on the treadmill to my right and thanked her for being an inspiration. As I was near death at this point -- legs trembling, shirt soaked through, gasping like my old Honda right before it keeled over, I had to repeat this several times. 

She nodded politely, as anyone unexpectedly accosted by some in-your-face panting stranger might, then walked away. 

Next, I turned to my neighbor to the left, a young, impeccably muscled, aggressively optimistic sort who kept letting out whoops and “yeah let’s do it” the entire 50-minute sweat fest and thanked him too. 

I expected him to nod politely and hightail it the heck out of my presence as speedily as possible. But to my surprise, he thanked me right back. He said I was an inspiration too. I was not expecting that. 

Over the next five minutes of cooling down and stretching, we talked about why we chose to be at OT that day. He shared how he liked to be around people who motivated him to do more. 

“Totally get that,” I said, and thanked him again. 

Like me, this guy belongs to another gym too, and like me he finds some of it a little boring, because most of the members seem to move at paces that don’t fit who he is. 

“I never do my best when I run there, because I’m always the only one on the treadmill,” he said. “Here,” and he pointed around the room to the two dozen sweaty nutcases who’d also cardio-ed themselves to near death, “I’m around people working hard. That’s inspiring.” 

His words got me thinking about the nature of inspiration, and how the company we keep can play a role in moving us forward to something new or can stymie us, hold us back.  As I walked to the car, guzzling my water and reveling in the forty splat points that proved I had every right to feel like I’d given my all, I thought about the process that landed me right there right then and came to no conclusions whatsoever. 

It was boredom, perhaps. I was sick of the mundanity, the comfort zone, the same faces and places. How else to explain why, without thinking twice, totally out of the blue, I steered my car into the OT parking lot one day last week and restarted my membership, which had lapsed two years ago?

I’ve hit OT three times since I re-upped. Each time, I drove there with a knot of dread in my gut. I think, “You’re too old for this, or, the cats need you, or, you could be home reading, writing, napping.” All excellent reasons to not torture myself. 

But instead of caving to complacency, each drive I turned up the music. Drowned out those negative thoughts with off-key singing. I don’t know why I didn’t give in. I don’t even know why I signed back up in the first place. 

Once at OT, I check in, see all these other folks, and take comfort in knowing that I’m not alone. I find my treadmill, nod to the athletes to my left and right, take a swig of water, and then it’s ready, set, let’s see what we’ve got. Right now, I’ve got a lot more that I thought. But there’s still a long way to go. Still, there’s nothing quite like an open highway, or in this case, I guess, an air-conditioned, state-of-the-art treadmill with similarly psycho people all around. 

Comfort zone, be gone. 

Forward continues to be a pace. 

 

Peak experience via the Sandia Tram

The first half of my life, I spent most of my winter weekends bombing ski slopes. “Bombing” is the verb my dad used to describe our Saturday and Sunday attacks. His word choice was spot-on because our family and two others – lots of us kids, would be out there non-stop, wreaking havoc, all day. 

I don’t remember feeling like me and my friends were terrorizing our fellow skiers, but considering that except for maybe twenty minutes for lunch, we commandeered any ski slope we were on, up down up down up down, vadling, slaloming, stem christie-ing with abandon down chutes, through bowls, over bumps, moguls, hardpack, powder, sometimes holding hands five or six across, or partnered up, or racing practically on our knees with poles tucked under our arms, until we were exhausted, it’s likely we did make some sort of negative impression on a few of the more sedate folks -- like our parents, who generally ignored us until it was time to go home. Good times. 

By five years old I was comfortable on just about every form of ski transport: rope tows, J-bars, T-bars, Poma lifts, chairlifts, gondolas. Never hesitated to get on any of this machinery. Never thought twice about danger or death.  Especially loved the gravity-defying stuff because it was speedy and efficient.  I lived in a world where swaying far above the earth, buried up to my ears in pointy hats, wool sweaters, bulky jackets, while wearing ten pounds of boots attached to narrow, wooden boards, was the norm,  and the faster we got to the top, the sooner we could get to bombing. 

It took until adulthood for me to realize that not everyone was comfortable traveling by air in big boxes hanging from skinny cables.  Last year in Australia with a bunch of fellow Sydney Marathon runners, I traveled on a tourist tram that took us over a huge swath of the Daintree Rainforest. It was a little boring. The weather was temperate, so we were in shorts and T-shirts. No winds cutting through us, chilling our noses or causing our ride to sway back and forth. Instead of skiers cutting paths through moguls far below, we saw a tame canopy that resembled stalks of broccoli. 

I kept peering over the railing, disappointed we couldn’t see any birds or kangaroos cavorting in the density. When I mentioned feeling let down, another passenger said he was avoiding looking below because he was terrified of heights. This was a gent of astounding athletic ability who’d qualified for the Boston Marathon multiple times. He was heroic in my eyes. I remember thinking about superman and kryptonite, and how we all have something.

Last week in Albuquerque, New Mexico I spent a short amount of time on the Sandia Peak Tramway. After waiting almost two hours for what was supposed to be an epic adventure, we spent a total of fifteen minutes in the air. Forty or so of us were crammed into this small, windowed space. I was stuck in the center and had to squeeze myself past my fellow travelers if I wanted to see anything other than armpits. 

The views were pretty -- lots of orange cliffs -- but in my opinion not worth a two-hour wait. Some folks were nervous because we swayed a little as we approached the summit. My biggest concern was the line we’d be standing in to get back to the bottom. It looked even longer than the line we’d waited in to go to the top. 

We were stuck at a restaurant at the peak for a while, because the tram had to temporarily shut down due to high winds. That was hard, toughing it out in a warm restaurant while courteous waiters brought me anything I wanted to eat, sipping chardonnay and admiring pretty views.

Finally got word that the tram was up and running again and found myself near the back of a ridiculously long line. A few minutes in, several people cut past, following the call of their tour guide far ahead, crazed masses elbowing past the old and the young, ready to trample and destroy to get back to flat ground. At the time, I was chatting with some folks nearby, who, like me, were not part of any tour group. We exchanged glances as these folks pushed us aside, pointing, at their excuse for less than polite behavior -- the guide urging them forward.

“True character reveals itself in adversity,” said one of the men, a pony-tailed artist from Colorado. 

“True that,” a curly-headed woman replied. 

A few minutes later another traveler, dark-haired, rushed from the front to the curly-haired woman, I’ll call her Jane, near me at the back. His voice was urgent. 

“Did you not see your messages? I’ve been trying to reach you. They’re letting us board soon. I told them I forgot my medicine and need to get back fast to take it.”

“You take medicine?” Jane said, then blinked and said something about not feeling comfortable with all this. 

“Yes.  I need my medicine back at the hotel, and I can't go without you. The car rental's in your name.” 

Jane averted her eyes, mumbled something to us about not even knowing the friend needed medicine, then said she felt awful about cutting. She muttered apologies to us as she pushed ahead. 

I could see the two of them once they were at the front. At first, they seemed to be arguing. Then Jane stomped off and commenced pacing. The dark-haired one turned his back to her and began chatting with his neighbors. 

Outside the wind was dying down a bit,  and soon the next tram began to load. As we slowly moved forward, I couldn’t help noticing all the folks ahead of me waiting to board. There were lots of young folks cavorting around,  reminding me of when I was a little kid loaded with energy, but there were lots of older folks too, some quite elderly and infirm. 

Ahead, Jane’s companion in need of meds continued chatting and laughing with the folks around him. He was one of the first to board the waiting tram, while Jane stood at the back of that boarding pack, head bowed and arms crossed. I wondered if her friend did in fact need meds. I wondered if that's what Jane was thinking too. I wondered what I would do in her situation. I started thinking about character and adversity, about how even heroes have kryptonite, and thought about how when I was a kid life was so much easier to understand, and how right then and there I'd give anything to be five years old again, practically smothering in layers, clomping around in  those insanely heavy boots, and getting ready to bomb down a mountain or two. 

 

 

 

 

I took a hot air balloon ride in Albuquerque. Here's how you can, too.

 

When I signed up for a writing workshop at Ghost Ranch, I figured my flying would be limited to the air space between Iowa and New Mexico.  I didn’t expect to end up hovering several thousand feet above the firmament in Albuquerque. But over the summer, as I started researching fun places to revisit after ten years away from this orangey-green promised land -- New Mexico is my second favorite state after Massachusetts -- I realized the workshop ending overlapped with ABQ’s International Balloon Fiesta, and behold, a seed was planted. Within a few days, my head went from why on earth would any sane human being want to fly in a balloon to “Why not?” 

That’s the back-of-the-matchbook version of how last week I ended up in a wicker basket three thousand feet above the Rio Grande.  

Back on flat, much lower land now, and still in process of trying to put all the beauty into words. Not sure those words will come in a manner that fully expresses all I experienced. For me, untangling this knot of thoughts isn’t easy. Consider this nuts-and-bolts how-to a start.

The Albuquerque Internation Balloon Festival is a week and a half celebration that takes place every October. Next year’s event is scheduled for October 2-10, 2027. If you get a chance, you should go. New Mexico is magic -- truly a land of enchantment, and a balloon ride through the famous Albuquerque box, above a breezy, verdant valley of farms and neighborhoods hugged by the sun-kissed Sandia Peaks, is the proverbial icing on the cake, the cherry on the sundae, the salt on the marguerita glass, the guac on the enchilada.  

Here are some suggestions to help you defy gravity and have fun while doing it. 

Make travel plans early. We started planning in July. This is too late if you hope to fly during the Fiesta. Every Fiesta balloon flight was already booked. Lucky for us, even though we were unable to book a flight during the Fiesta, there were plenty of openings right after it ended.  We had no problem booking a flight for the day after. 

By July, hotels were packed. We lucked out, getting the last available room in one of the hotels close to the park.  

Why choose a hotel close to the festival park? Online forums agreed that traffic near the festival is a hassle, and the festival website, which did offer paid parking, recommended taking shuttles. Our hotel was a mile from the park and offered a paid festival shuttle. This seemed like a great way to avoid parking and travel hassles.  We took the shuttle to the Fiesta on the last day. The next day, the day we flew, we had no problem driving to the balloon site and finding parking. 

Prepare to overpay. Airplane tickets, car rentals, hotels, and balloon flight prices are jacked up during the festival. I was in the mood for a road trip anyhow,  so once I saw how high the prices were, I arranged to fly into Denver five hours north, which had great deals on air travel and car rentals, and drove down through Taos, a favorite. This made sense for me, given I was headed to Ghost Ranch first for several days. 

Though we each paid about $50 less for our balloon flight because we went up the day after the festival ended, our purchase prices were still a bit inflated -- ha ha,  compared to costs a week or so after the Fiesta. 

Rainbow Ryders is the official balloon ride company. You can book on their website or over the phone. They were great about answering questions and communicating info on what to expect. 

Despite your best planning, your flight might not happen. We attended the balloon festival on the final day, arriving at dawn, expecting to take lots of pictures while we reveled in the awesome sight of hundreds of multi-colored balloons filling Albuquerque’s brilliant azure sky. Unfortunately, officials had to cancel that last mass ascension.  Though the weather on the ground was fine and the light breeze quite refreshing, that final, humongous celebration of flight that visitors from multitudes of states and from countries all over the world had been looking forward to all week was shut down due to unsafe cross currents far above our heads that most of us weren’t even aware of. 

I expected our flight the following morning to be canceled because it was breezier than the day before. Nope. Our flight went off as scheduled, no problem. Those mysterious cross currents were fine that day. 

Check in started at 6 am. Rainbow Ryders sent detailed info on parking, so arrival was easy. We had to bring our confirmation – a screen shot was fine – and had to sign paperwork releasing the company from any liability for injury. Standard stuff. Once that paperwork was complete – it took five minutes at most, we were given a code and told to find the sign in the field across the lane that matched. A few minutes later, we were in line with about ten other people, our balloon partners, our ride or dies for the morning. 

The air was cool – in the 50s or so. We’d been advised to dress in layers and bring water if we wanted. There was no other water available. We were allowed to bring small bags, but I opted not to carry anything.  I wore clothing with lots of pockets: jeans, a fleece top, and an anorak over that. I had plenty of room for a water bottle, car keys, cell phone. I wanted my hands free for taking pictures or for grabbing onto my fellow travelers as we plunged to our deaths. Only partly kidding there. I had no idea what to expect. 

Once we were all gathered, around 6:45, we followed Matt, a police officer in a local town who worked part-time for Rainbow Ryders. Matt and another young gent were the set-up guys. It was still dark as we followed them from the brightly lit field next to the RR kiosk and headed to the ascension area, an expansive field abuzz with the sounds of talk, laughter, engines. Though the official Fiesta was over, there were 25 to 30 balloons going up that morning, which meant about 300 people in total were meandering around the field. While Matt and the others commenced the grunt work involved in getting our balloons inflated, we had time to wander, talk to our fellow travel mates, take pictures. 

By 7:45, the sun was rising and so were the balloons. The scenery was surreal and the atmosphere celebratory. We peanut-sized humans were surrounded on all sides by giant, puffy bags of air, in every color of the rainbow. Soon we started loading into the baskets – called gondolas, that would be our home for the next hour or so.  

I was surprised at the length and height of the gondolas. I was imagining that there’d be maybe four of us in each basket, but our basket easily held ten guests, five per side, plus the pilot. I expected that there’d be an entry gate on the basket but that was not the case. The sides were mostly solid. Matt guided us up a small step stool, instructed us to put our feet into ladder rung-like openings in one side of the basket, then supported us as we stepped over the padded railing onto the basket floor. Even for someone as short as I am, the process was simple.  

Our pilot Alfred, a quiet dude who joked that it was his first flight then admitted he’d been doing this for almost two decades, gave some very brief instructions on how to position our bodies for take-off and landing. Easy stuff. Then he turned his back on us, adjusted the propane flame, pulled on some cables, and before we knew it, we were several feet off the ground. It was that easy.  No swaying, no bumps, no scary screeching from me or from any machinery.  One minute we were on dirt and the next we were rising. 

By now it was 8 am. 

I thought I’d be afraid, but I wasn’t. I thought I wouldn’t want to look down. But I did. Everything was so calm, so peaceful. The sun rose gently and so did we. As the light shifted, so did our view. We saw every color. The grays of the distant peaks gave way to blues then pinks, oranges, reds, yellows and every combination in between. Cotton candy clouds scudded past. Around us, our fellow ballooners rose, dropped, danced, all of us in slow motion, guided by shifting breezes and the quiet expertise of our pilots. 

We meandered north for the most part, sometimes following Route 25 or country roads, always with the Rio Grande either in perfect sight or peek-a-booing beneath scrubby sagebrush and creosote, golden-leafed cottonwoods, and the occasional piney glen. 

We crossed over neighborhoods where horses stared, dogs barked, people stopped, looked up, waved, and we waved back. We saw coyotes running through woods, and cows doing their cow thing in grassy fields. Our pilot Alfred occasionally pointed out white crosses painted on backyard lawns. Potential landing spots, he explained. This surprised me because I thought we’d be landing in some sort of official balloon landing area, replete with bleachers and loudspeakers. 

While we flew, Matt and his helper, both now acting as ground crew, tracked us below. Every single one of the 25 to 30 balloons that rose and fell with us also had a dedicated ground crew, each driving a dedicated van. Our pilot used a walkie talkie to communicate with them and other folks on the ground and in the sky.

Forty-five minutes into our trip, Alfred began looking for places to land. To decelerate in preparation, he let the balloon skim the tops of trees. While I couldn't feel a thing, I could hear the branches scrape the gondola bottom. For some reason, this made me laugh. Alfred had his pick of locales. There were plenty of fields available, and lots of friendly folks waved their arms, encouraging him to pick their property or road. 

We ended up landing softly and without any bumping or yelling whatsoever on a quiet neighborhood street in the town of Corrales, just northwest of Alburquerque. Matt and his van were already set up and waiting for us just a couple of feet away, along with a police officer who temporarily secured the area and redirected traffic which was minimal, two cars tops. 

We stayed in the gondola as the balloon deflated around us. Within seconds after, we were escorted out of the basket and onto the road. Again, this was easy and not awkward at all, even for a shorty like me. While Matt and company proceeded to pack up the balloon, Alfred set up a table, poured some orange juice and champagne and we raised a glass to the beautiful morning and our glorious adventure. Some of us, ahem, raised more than one glass. 

A few minutes later we were all in the van and too soon after, we were back at our car. It was so much fun. I hope one day I get to do this again. 

Here are some relevant websites, for anyone interested: 

www.balloonfiesta.com  Official Balloon Fiesta website

www.rainbowryders.com  Official Hot Air Balloon company website

www.cabq.gov  City of Albuquerque website

 

 

 

Do you know a predator? Probably.

 Last week I hit the Donald J.Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile. Then a few days later I visited the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. 

Both were awful. The overwhelming amounts of material linking Epstein to Trump, the raw emotion in the artwork of survivor Maria Farmer. . . it was all hard to take. But it’s important for me to bear witness. By doing so I'm doing my best to support and validate the survivors, demand justice for them, and do what I can to break the silence. Silence is the breeding ground of complicity. Silence minimizes/ normalizes/ ignores/enables sexual abuse.  

Half the nation elected a known sexual predator to the highest office in the land. You’d have to have been comatose the last thirty years to NOT know that this monster abused and violated women. Even before the internet put his despicable deeds on full, easily searchable display, his criminal actions – including multiple sexual assault  allegations, regularly made the front pages of national and local newspapers, magazines, tabloids. 

Yet, some of my neighbors, former friends, and co-workers – people I used to respect and now have as little to do with as possible, minimized/ normalized/ ignored all this, and voted for him not once, twice, but even three times, and by doing so chose to minimize, normalize, ignore, and enable sexual assault. 

One out of every five females experiences sex assault. I've known this stat forever and had it imprinted on my brain during multiple grad school classes while getting my master’s in education. Over the decades since, the stats haven’t changed. Don’t believe me? Then practice due diligence and do your own research. You won’t be able to tell me I’m wrong.

I’ve done the work and walked the walk. Thirty years as a teacher who worked with thousands of kids, and I can verify that the one out of five stat is maybe even a little low.  

Sex assault survivors are everywhere. Predators are too. 

As a new teacher back in the early ‘90s, I was mentored by a teacher deeply respected by students, peers, parents, administrators. I learned the nuts and bolts of working in a classroom from this guy. I moved on to a different school after one year and lost track of him.  I heard he eventually left the classroom and moved into admin posts in other districts.

A few years ago, he made the local papers. Nearing retirement age after a child-centered career spanning more than three decades, he was arrested on charges related to child pornography. Among the details of his arrest, newspaper reports at the time say police found over 200 images of child sexual abuse materials on a CD at his house. 

Last I read about him were reports that he claimed he was abused by priests as a child. 

I can’t make sense out of any of this. Confronting the facts and continuing to stand up for survivors helps.