Hotels 1: Fairfax (2/28/2020)

My travel season, or should I say travel year, has started. We usually have a slow January. Mine followed by six local workshops in late January and early February, and this week my travel started with a big bang: a three-day class in Fairfax. This meant three hotel nights and an almost five hour drive back home, last night. Now it is nose to the grindstone and teach my heart out.

Around president’s day my wife and I visited the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. They had a Hopper exhibit. The exhibit dealt with Hopper’s vision of the American hotels, motels and guest houses. 

A photo of me in front of a vignette at the museum depicting a Hopper scene.  This is really the scene that gave me the idea of this series.

One of my favorite pieces in the exhibit   Blue girl on black bed.  Not by Hopper, and sorry I did not write down the artist.

This gave me the idea of doing something similar to Hopper; take pictures in and of my motel room and maybe even describing the stay there. No, I do not want to make it a review. I have already done this at times when I wrote about the sounds next door while trying to go to sleep, and my fantasies about what happened in my room before I occupied it. If you search for the word travel in my blog, you find some other references, but these two are the clearest ones about motel room stays.

So this past visit to Fairfax was the first, and the Hilton Garden Inn where I stayed must have suspected something, because they rolled out the welcome mat for me. Something I do not deserve; I am only a minor member of their loyalty program. But the fridge was stocked with free goodies (darn, no beer) and there were plenty of fruit and candy bars for me to enjoy. Since I try to watch that elusive girlish figure of mine I did not touch it, although I did have an energy bar for breakfast one morning.

On my way up I had stopped by IKEA and in a weak moment I had bought one of their cheap bonsai trees ($14.94): a ginseng ficus. I brought the tree up to my room as my “emotional support plant.” I still wonder what the cleaning ladies thought of a customer who brought his own plant to his room, but I assume that they have seen stranger items in a room. I’ll refrain from speculating here.

Well, here I’ll post my first Hopper like picture. I already posted it on Instagram, but still for those of you who do not follow me there. Enjoy.

My version of a Hopper like view of my Hilton Garden Inn Hotel room in Fairfax.

A belated entry into 2020, but here I go (2/5/2020)

The guilt feelings are creeping up, I have not posted in almost two months. Why is that? Well, a minor case of depression has set in. In addition to it being a brand spanking new year, and relatively little daylight, we have currently been looking at a year started with record high temperatures. I put a positive spin on the temperatures, by telling folks on my Facebook page that it was wonderful that “Summer fell on the weekend this month.” But in fact, it is darn scary to have temperatures in the mid-70s or around 25 degrees Celsius in the middle of January and again this week, while Facebook was reminding us of the 10 inches of snow, we had two years ago. That is global warming for you. Or should we call it climate change? Still, a whole section of society does not seem to give a damn about what is happening to the earth.

At least the weather allowed me to work on the back deck a bit and on repotting a bonsai of mine. In addition, a friend of ours redid her yard and removed several azaleas and donated two to my bonsai selection. I really had to hack at the roots of these 25-year-old plants and now it is hoping they survive. 

This all somehow kept my mind away from the major issue at hand. Two days after the new year we got the message that my trusty old dog Jake was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of either the liver of pancreas. I have written a lot about my walks with my dogs, in particular Jake, in the woods behind my home. That news really hurt. We are now in doggy hospice, waiting for the inevitable. Yes, we adopted a new dog, Jasper, on November 17, and I am sure he will eventually fill the gap that Jake will leave, but this guy is special.

A photo of Jake take on February 1 this year.  He still looks in decent shape, although a month ago the vet said he had days of weeks to live.  I'll miss the old guy.

Jasper our new dog has made himself at home.  Being a hound he has to sleep in a pack and always need to be close to Jake.  I want to bet that he'll miss Jake as well.

Jake was adopted 11 years ago. We had gone to the Newport News SPCA to look at the border collie, but that dog was too crazy, jumped on kitchen counters and seemed like a piece of work. Then we saw Jake, cowering in his cage in a corner and somehow, we fell in love. In the beginning he was a runner, and we had to keep him under control, on the leash and we fenced in a small section of our yard. He has gotten much mellower and if he can help it and is not being pushed out of the way by Jasper, every morning he will site next to me for a back and head rub. 

Oh well, folks that is the issue with being an animal lover. Most animals have a shorter lifespan than us and it is something we are confronted with a number of times during our life. At least three times in my life did the dog we owned disappear and never returned. Our first one was old, and I suspect she walked off to die alone somewhere in the bush of Curacao, the island I grew up on. The second was a runner, and we never knew what happened to her. So was the third, Moses, and my parents found him dead, obviously hit by a car somewhere in the Netherlands where we lived at the time. All other dog we had to deal with mortality one way or another. 

The relationship between humans and their pets is a beautiful thing. I guess it is because the pets show something like unconditional love; a thing that does not happen much in human relationships. Pets become completely integrated into the household and act like they own the place. I was amazed last night when my wife told me about a colleague of hers whose son sent their young family pet to a trainer for two weeks to get obedience training. The trainer seems to do this with electroshocking and now the, in our eyes, poor young dog just shakes when being called or told to sit, in anticipation of getting a shock if he is not obeying. I cannot imagine taking all the spontaneity, love, and trust out of an animal like that.

In his book “The Empathic Civilization,” Jeremy Rifkin discusses how babies are born with unconditional love and empathy but somehow somewhere we lose it. A new form of empathic humans needs to evolve he argues for the human race and civilization to survive. I did not get a chance to finish the book completely, and I will, once I retire. One thing is for sure, we desperately need more empathy and compassion in this world. We seemed to have lost it judging from the callousness of our current politicians willing to stick children in cages and look the other way just to save their political skin. 

Having said all this, judging from the first month of the new year, 2020 is not going to be much more empathetic. To the contrary, it is showing to be worse, politically, humanity wise and even the climate is showing signs that it will have no mercy.