Trip to Gainesville

Home again after a week in Gainesville visiting old friends and their friends. Lots of socializing, a spectacular birthday party where everyone was required to read/tell a story of a memorable birthday (nonfiction!) after dinner. I was deeply moved and excited by the insights I was able to share from the stories of these women I barely knew. Another day, I read three poems to a small gathering for music & poetry in Melrose. They laughed and enjoyed my poems, feeding my joy in writing them. It was a week with virtually no exercise, so now I have a lot of catching up to do.

In Gainesville, I got to know a woman I want to know better and get closer to. How to do that from so far away is a dilemma. I need woman-company. Grumpy and I get along and are good to each other, but we share almost no interests and he doesn't like to talk. I want to talk! I want intimacy, though I've pretty much aged out of any interest in sex. I want a long-distance relationship with a woman along with my partnership with Grumpy. Can this work? Maybe.

One particular highlight of my trip was a visit to and guided tour of a big cat sanctuary called E.A.R.S. One of the women at the party, and her partner, created (and largely constructed themselves) this sanctuary on 35 acres near Gainesville. They provide a home, until death, for abused, dumped, and confiscated large animals, mostly big cats (tigers, lions, cougars, etc.) but also a few bears, monkeys, etc. The animals have room to run, and most are human-friendly enough to also get a lot of tender love from their big-hearted keepers. Gail abandoned college to travel to Nepal to study tiger behavior. Now, that's the sort of thing I sometimes dreamed of but never actually had the balls to do. Back in the states, she worked helping to take care of tigers for a circus and ended up doing a year of ringmaster tiger work for enough $$ to pay off the chunk of land in Florida. She and her partner have gigantic hearts and have pretty much turned their lives over to cat-keeping. They are amazing, admirable women. I couldn't possibly do such a thing and am very glad someone else does.

One night we went to a ballet (Aspen Santa Fe Ballet) that included four pieces, each by a different choreographer. The Moses Pendleton piece, Noir Blanc, stole the show. We were blown away. We left the theatre in a daze of perception-altering, other-worldly music, costume, and dance. Costume & lighting effects were used to create the perception of dancers doing the impossible and impossibly beautiful.