My drive to San Francisco!

A poem on My mothers Death

Thanks for letting me share this with you. I hope that everyone is happy and well.

Our mother died today
1736 time marked out by her last breath
So our memories flow freely now
Unencumbered by her rattling breaths
A valiant heart struggling to maintain
What cannot be.

Memories of her sun soaked tea
Sweet pickled watermelon rinds
Endless baked treats brought to
Endless 4-H meetings
Ferried about as we were by her
Our lives hers
Her life was ours and now…
Now we are alone with her body
And our memories
Of what it is
To be our mothers sons.

David Michael McCullough

Toward the very end my mother would try so hard to say thank you to anyone who helped her. I'm here next to her at this moment, holding her hand at 3:30 a.m. Death seems a peculiar kind of loneliness. She is not alone but is on this journey.

My mother's brain so beautiful in it's constant creativity. Now invaded by bony cancer sending her thoughts careening into unimaginable places. Weaver, writer, artist, teacher, cook, wife, mother, sculptor and more. Not yet gone but fading away as I watch and wait.

At times it seems these days pass as if in a dream while one close to you dies.

The light upon the water,
Rays of sunlit joy upon the salty seas of home,
All these things shall last
As I will not
As my mother will not
As my brother will not
As my father did not.

But this caring of mine?
It will not last nor should it
For others should care.

Others should gaze upon sunlit rays wandering upon the oceans
The fish underneath
The stars wheeling overhead
In their timeless Soaring dance

As the seasons
As you
As I
Disappear into the sandy shores
Distant islands as souls
Scattered upon their star studded shores

The waves lap and careen and crash
I'll be waiting somewhere I think
I'll want to know you see
What happens to it all

To you, to me, the world
The people we loved
And once were.

This sun, through clouds,
Burnishes the golden Bridge
Carrying me home
Where memory lives.

Post Holiday Blues

The dreaded post holiday blues are back. One wonders how one can exist faced with the somewhat dull humdrum repetition of ordinary existence. Grateful in one second yet filled with the angst of god how I wish it could all be different and exciting ALL the time instead of just sporadically.

I AM glad to be back. Really I am, good if not great to see my mom. Dying as she is so gracefully she is not in any pain. All those frenzied preparations I made prior to my departure on holiday were not in vain and things go better than expected. But I come 'home' to grey skies in the San Francisco area, overcast, cold, cloudy, dull, boring. We hates it forever as Gollum from The Hobbit would say.

So I feel petty in the same moment feeling this way. Not that my life lacks meaning because I have so much meaning with my work and especially my friends all around the globe.

I am back to not having enough time in my day to accomplish everything I need or want to. I live in two places at once when I just want to live in one place which is on the Ridge, the coast, safely elevated above the fog for much of the time!

All in all I lead a happy life not consumed with worry about food, water or safety. That means a lot. It is a charmed life in so many ways and one I am grateful for. Yet I yearn for challenge (other than that of my mother dying) and an opportunity to live more simply and to give more to others. That is what partly drove me to Peace Corps over, dare I say it, THIRTY years ago and continues to drive me till the day my death comes.

What it Means to be Back

It is good to be back but I find myself longing for that sense of Peace Corps excitement and purpose, that frisson, so to speak of unknowing and the excitement engendered by it. Working overseas provides that, at least for me and I find myself still longing for it . . . and I realize that I will for the rest of my life.

This is the challenge many of us face - how do you reconcile the needs of life - i.e., what you must do versus one's dreams? This is said with the full knowledge that simply having this chance to even wonder is a gift in and of itself. I don't struggle for food, water or shelter. I don't worry about armed conflict or bad people coming to take me away in the early nightmare hours.

Times will change for America with the inevitability of the centuries passing . . . but I do not see this coming down for years. If I am lucky, I'll be dead by then.

Home it's said, lies where the heart is. While mine lies in no particular place I've come to realize home is where my love lies. That is with the people that I love and they are scattered across the face of this planet. I may favor some physical locations but truly I am tied to people who have imbued places with memory and meaning.

View from my stool in Budapest

Need I say more? Ahhhhhh!

The Beach - Southern Turkey - July 2010

Hot and very humid but truly beautiful, I would more likely visit this place in late Fall or Spring. The white wire cages cover up turtle eggs buried in the sand to protect them from us. Hard to believe eggs can survive that heat - I could see the shimmer of heat lifting off the sand most of the day. Mid day we would often retreat to the shade and even air condtioning of the room. Most people, residents and visitors, did the same.

Hotel (Otel) in Alachati, Southern Turkey

In the last ten or so years this Southern Turkish town has exploded in growth and this hotel is only four years old. Beautiful hotel, great service and staff with wonderful and healthy food. Still, it is a resort town and full of local and international tourist. I would not go here again unless I knew someone. Keep in mind that I spend over two years in Fiji and eight years in Hawai'i dealing with the impacts of tourism and I know the rotten deal tourist can get. Still, all in all it was a beautiful place and I would gladly stay here again.

Tomorrow we catch Pegasus airlines to Izmir fir one week. More tourist. Like me. Want the country side, small towns, no damn shopping. Well it will be what I make of it.

Eating at a restaurant in Istanbul over glass roof below our table into rooms/vaults from the Byzantine era. Going below you can see the layers of history of course and arch after arch receding into the dim recesses of history.

Puts one in place.

A Glass of Raki (ra - kuh) for a late night apertif overlooking the Bosphorus sea between Asia and the European side.

The Sultan Ahmet mosque or the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. Humbling thousands of years of history!

On our way to the Hamburg Airport early this morning. Grump kids and adults, me not wanting to say goodbye but having to once again leave people I love. I understand the attraction of not ever leaving so as to avoid this pain. Can one see the world by staying? Learn about I am sure but to have your soul changed and challenged? I know this to be impossible. It is the 'foreign' that enriches.

As I write this we are high over Germany flying to a country I've never been to yet would like to visit if not live. Such it is for almost any place I've ever set for in or even read about. The Congo scares me as do all the warring factions and shear butchery occurring there.

I send my greetings, respect and aloha to any reading this. When and I'd you do travel please check out the following books.…mine is: Istanbul: The Collected Traveler. An Inspired Companion Guide, edited by Barrie Keeper A Vintage Departures Original.

There are more in the series. It is a very great read, fascinating, informative, luscious and eminently readable in a long sitting or simple, easy delicious bites.

www.vintagebooks.com

You will not regret getting this. It is not a guide but full of history, fun, food, culture and so much more.

A Hui Hou.

David

Final Dispatch / Bremen, Deutschland

Wie Gehts es Ihnen? Sehr Gut!?

Tomorrow I fly from Hamburg to Istanbul. The last two days have been incredible romps through the past. More on this later but I visited my family childhood home in Florsheim Am Main (village) from 1965-68. I met the woman we rented the house from and she remembered us fondly. It looks so different now but still 'our' house. Then I hunted down some old friends not seen in the past 42 years and they remembered me at first sight. They were incredible then and still are. Heinz and Anna - had a DVD of an old 8 mm film of their wedding and there was my family, Mom, Dad, Paul, myself and even my grandmother. How beautiful we all were so long ago. I cried a lot, with some melancholy, joy and thankfulness.

Also saw the Gossens and they are just incredible and wonderful people whom I hope we will stay in touch with.

Much more later but so good to see old friends.

Tschuss -

David

Dispatch from Frankfurt, Deutschland. Spent the day on the A3 autobahn driving South to Frankfurt staying at the Frankfurt City Campground right in the middle of the city. Pitched a big tent and went to some old friends house in Dietzenbach just off highway 661. Christoph is married to a woman from Iowa that grew up only a one hour drive from where my mom grew up in Mason City, Iowa. It's a small village sometimes and I wish people would regard that before they turn to war.

Tomorrow I hope to see Christoph and Regina's parents in the morning. After that a continuation of my trip down memory lane although at this point it's more of a autobahn then a lane!

I left messages with my brother today. No call from him about my mom. Just wish to know the details of how she is even though she has called me. She is out of pain at least so that's good.

Germany, need it be said has changed so much. I can see my street on Google maps but it is no longer a dead end to a field and a World War II bomb shelter at the end of that street. I wonder at the past and all that it contains, memories, people, hopes, dreams, disappointments, wishes, births, death and everything in between. Id love to know what happens beyond my death but am not sure I could stand to be immortal. Too much sadness and regret at watching the centuries pass by, the people you love. It already breaks my heart at times.

Hard to believe I write this from near my childhood home where I last set foot on forty-two years ago. I remember the last drive out of our driveway in our Volkswagen, my red pogo stick lying in the green grass between the two rows of stone for the tires. How vivid but as if in a dream.

What will I find? What will I learn? That you can't go home again like Rosseau? I learned this long ago. My goodbyes only grow more difficult and the sadness of parting more of melancholy suffused with sustained and lasting joy mixed in.

I do not know what I shall see or discover but my journey to this secret place has taught me much.

David

Tomorrow we drive from Bremen to Frankfurt on the autobahn @ 200 kph all the way. Off to see friends and the house Paul and I grew up in from 1965-68 in Florsheim am Main (about 20 minutes E/SE of Frankfurt Airport). No doubt a rush of memories. My car was towed today to the tune of 180 Euros so am calling it a learning cultural experience and sometimes you must decide that it hurts 'good' when the alternative is to whinge. Tschuss!

Fotos are being posted to Picasa online so please drop me a line to get in if interested.

Dispatch from abroad: Bremen, Deutschland, June 26, 2010

Wie Gehts meinen Damen und Herren! Live or semiconscious at 0445 here on Falkenstrasse staying with my friends Benno, Dina, Kai und Taylor. The direct opposite time difference is a bit dodgy but I am having a great time. Reconnecting with old friends first met in Hawai'i in 1990. I have not seen them since about 2005 or 2006 when I had gone back to Hawai'i for our friend Colin Denney's wedding. Never heard from Colin again, sadly enough that his is standard operating procedure although he is a fine person. But, I digress.

Memories of growing up in Germany have come flooding back but many are insubstantial and what I call 'eine kleine kind' or 'little kid' memories. This includes the color and taste of liquorish candies, the smells and sights such as a barge on the River Elbe. I grew up in a small village called Florsheim am Main, South of Frankfurt and West of Wiesbaden. Our street was Landstrasse but I do not know the number. I remember seeing and smelling the paper factory. I remember playing with our friends and the local dare was to run down the stairs to the World War II bomb shelter and touch the doors and make it back up.

Just children then, we had no idea of the cataclysm that had shaped the world and so many of the attitudes of a generation. To us it was nothing and it was only later that I learned of the camps, Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and the hundreds of others that existed within the sphere of Nazi influence. We Americans like to deceive ourselves into thinking that it could not happen in America, that surely we are better then the Nazi's. But for me, I have seen too much. My mother took my brother and I to a camp and for years, every once in awhile I would have dreams, sometime nightmares of half imagined Nazi's still alive to terrorize me and the people I loved.

To this day I wonder why my mother took us, yet when asked she has a clear answer. She thought we should know. Indeed, that is a very clear lesson . . . that we must never forget. In the broader sense it applies to all evil that is done in the world. I was not damaged by what I saw but to my dying day it will affect me and i think in no small measure has contributed to my own quest to do some good in the world while I walk among you.

We hope to drive to my old home in a few days. I hope we can meet some old friends, hoist a few beers and maintain some tenuous hold on a distant relationship. I am glad I have come, not only to celebrate the ties that bind but also I think so I can do my own remembering. Not only of my own past but to remember it all, to not forget, to deny the naysayers their insane and ignorant quest to deny us all the privilege of knowing evil and the sacrifice made by so many. After all, I take care of many World War II veterans every week while their numbers grow less each day.

I am having a challenge in connecting to my friend's wireless Vodafone network. My iPhone picks up the network, I type in the passcode yet it cannot lock onto it. In this way I hope to post some fotos and other dispatches from Germany and then Turkey in another week. I bought a local phone yet am also having connection issues. calling the US for about five minutes was eight Euros, one Euro being about 1.25 US at this time.

I am missing my friends at work and send them a shout out. It is good to be in Germany again. I called my brave mother yesterday and she once again said she is doing fine and reassured me that I should be here. Yet still, I long to be by her side, doing my Nurse Manly thing for her out of the gratitude I have for doing her Mothering to me for the last 49 years of my life. When she dies, it will be a loss. Yet as so many friends and coworkers said to me . . . Carpe Diem.

For there is no other time but now.

David

Business class from New York to London is something I could get use to quite easily. Kudos to the staff at JFK's American Airlines for an upgrade, their laughter and kindness.

AA178 SFO/JFK/Heathrow/Hamburg

Aloha and halfway to the Big Apple. Once I land I have 55 minutes to wend my way through JFK airport to find my flight to London. I have no checked baggage so anticipate no issues on that end. Not bad for three week trip to Germany and Istanbul really, only a small backpack and a wheeled carry on. I will see my dearest friends in Germany that I knew in graduate school in Hawai'i. They live in Bremen, just outside of Hamburg. I land there about 1800 June 25, 2010, pick up a rental car and spend a week with them. I am very excited, great people and they have two incredible,beautiful children.

It will be interesting to see Germany again after so many years - forty to be exact. I left in 1968 and have only been back albeit briefly. It was only 20 years after the Second World War that I was there and the new enemy then were the Russians. We always seem to manufacture a new enemy to fit the times.

I am exhausted and my mind continuously goes to my mother. Dying of cancer, but not actively or else I would not be making this trip, I admire her so much and she is so brave. It is a choice and she is a great example for me and others. I established three numbers for her and others to call, a San Francisco Skype number, a European mobile number and my regular mobile number. I wrestled with this decision more than many tough calls I have had to make. Initially I was not going to go but my mom even asked me to please go after knowing that I will return instantly if she or my brother and his wife need me. The Doctors encouraged me, my workmates encourage me to so . . . so here I sit at 36,000 feet in total comfort. Only 1.5 hours of sleep in the last 36 hours so soon I will be passing out.

I look forward to what is to come on this trip but still, I miss my mother and I continue to hold her close.

Thanks for reading. Malama pono, a hui hou.

David, signing off from somewhere over America en route to Germany.

My mother lies in the UCSF Emergency Department, dying too slowly by
her courageous estimate. I am reduced to tenacious advocate for pain
meds, imaging, admission, palliative care. But not death and alas, no
dominion over death, not I, not this time. I shall accept it but
begrudgingly initially. Till the woman who bore me embraces it and
death embraces her, it will be a trying journey beset on all
sides by the ravening dogs of war.

So I play many roles, ER Nurse Man, advocate but most of all I yearn
to be just her son and as she slips the surly bonds of earth I will
tend to her body and soul. I will clean, dress, feed, comfort, read to
and most of all love her as a son.

Thank you for reading.

David