Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

   Last week Jan and I and our three daughters who live in Alaska, Jen, Liz and Autumn, left for a journey to one of the great wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon. Before we left, I happened to mention to my good friend Renee Alexander that we would be lucky to make twenty five miles without having to take a bathroom break. She wrote me back a day or so later and said that she'd had an epiphany during the night; an idea for a book which might be a best seller. She suggested the title, "Peeing Across America: Memoirs of an Old Man and his Three Daughters With Weak Bladders." I loved the title, but figured it might be a little long for a book. I may have to tweak it, but I'm definitely going to use some variation of it in a future book. I mentioned Renee's suggestion to Autumn, who whole-heartedly endorsed it, and using her phone started to document our trip as we took a leak in a vast number of restrooms across this great land. We left on a Friday night to catch...

 How often have you been somewhere, when out of the blue a scent wafts past your nasal passages and you're instantly transported back to another time, another place. I'm not suggesting that the memory will always be pleasant. Perhaps you'll get a whiff of someone's old gym shoes and you'll be reminded of Phys ed class in ninth grade when a bully made you smell his socks under the threat of a thorough pounding. Maybe it's something more pleasing, like a lady passing by on the street and you catch the slightest scent of her perfume and you're transported through time to a summer romance from your youth. In what is the first of it's kind in the world, the USPS has come out with scratch and sniff stamps. As you can see, they look like frozen treats, and actually, you don't even have to scratch them to get a whiff of the delicate sweet scent. Perhaps receiving a bill from the electric company will be a little less unpleasant with a scratch and sniff ...