1. The condition of being sane.
2. reasonable behavior.
Synonyms include: 1. mental health, reason, rationality, stability, lucidity, sense, wits, mind. 2. sense, good sense, common sense, wisdom, prudence, rationality.
At the end of the mid-term election cycle here in Washington DC, it is about time that someone, anyone, finally starts talking sanity. It would be a totally worthless exercise to discuss why. If you need a reminder, just turn on your television, or click through the news headlines, or walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, where you can be accosted by LaRouche fanatics and Falun Gong enthusiasts alike.
So for the benefit of good mental health, I was fortunate enough to have two weddings to go to in this past month- ample mana required to remind one that love and friendship and other good and real beauties, still exist, indeed thrive, in spite of all the malice, ignorance and division which lurch beneath the autumn foliage of every even-numbered year. Mike and Alexis wed in Virginian wine country (Congrats!). A few weeks later, Andrew in Yulia tied the knot (officially, this time) outside of Kansas City.
And I also needed good mental health after the countless hours I spent treading numbers in the tsunami which is the end of the fiscal year. I found myself washed ashore on dry land on the First of October, ready to leave the walking dead and live among the living again - and not head into work on the weekends.
So in Kansas and Missouri I got to catch up with a pack of Peace Corps friends and see a fine city that I'd never seen before. After a decent flight over the Appalachians (and a clear glimpse of the late Sen. Robert Byrd's magnificent windmill farms), via Fedex-Memphis, I reached Kansas City in mid-evening. After meeting up with my friend Margaret and determining that there was no suitable establishment to wait out late arrivals Greg and Eileen, we decided to head downtown and check into our hotel - the Hotel Phillips - the same wood-panelled establishment President Harry Truman used to run a haberdashery out of.
Kansas City immediately reminded me of several places at once. It yearned for the "shining city on the hill" vibe of several American cities - princely among them Chicago, but also Birmingham, and even playing at a Gothic industrial cousin of Pittsburgh. Furthermore, it had a hint of my beloved Denver: clean air in blue sky, sharp lines, and bricked, turn-of-the-century buildings.
One of the great things about American cities is that you can smell the geography of a place the moment you arrive, and contrasting devices that would clash on other continents are juxtaposed so appropriately here.
Let me pose a very good example. New Orleans smells of the Mississippi - the source and origin of all its identity. From deep in the Delta, the city acts like a trawler - gathering up all the hidden jewels from its muddy bed - a menagerie of Western hints, such as Indian arrowheads and long-gone Buffalo dung, fermented prairie flowers like the jazz and other souls of the Plains, French colonial castaway coins, Caribbean and Gulf flotsam and jetsam, the dark and secret cultured streams of the Deep South mingles with a Latin conglomerate....
Kansas City faces West. It always has. It looks forward with that bright American optimism that once upon a time used to guide our view of ourselves and the world around us. It stands at the crossroads between three vastly different regions of the States. Nearby Independence, the home of President Harry Truman, used to be the launching site for the wagon trains West. Not only is this city a confluence of the streams of the South, Midwest and the Great Plains, it also once served as the last outpost for those drifting out to the Wilds of the Far West; abandoning all known sanctuaries in a tremendous leap of faith towards failure and destruction, or a better life yielded through a bold and difficult struggle for self-determination and adventure.
Now it has the world's finest barbecue, an odd, yet whimsical airport and a very fine football franchise.
Like many American cities of its size, downtown Kansas City is an extremely quiet place on the weekends. Yet also like other comparable cities, that is changing slowly as bright, classy lofts are forged out of old warehouses (even in these hard times) and folks are returning to the city center to live and play after hours sans daily commute by motor vehicle.
I only had an hour or two to walk the streets alone on that Saturday morning before the wedding - so I spent them walking around America's only dedicated World War I museum and memorial. A solemn and quiet place, it spoke volumes with few words.
The wedding was a lovely Ukrainian-American affair, with silly songs and even sillier games that Ukrainians often play with young people of the opposite sex who are dull in their puritan sensibilities.
But on a broader note, I have to say that weddings of my good friends never fail to remind me how many superb families like the Meyer's dot the nation like fine oak trees.
I returned by way of Minneapolis-St. Paul in the Fall. Impressed by Minnesota from the air, I vowed to return one day to do some fishing. The fall foliage was spectacular and I had never in my life seen so many lakes (I thought the slogan "Land o Lakes" was just good butter marketing). If I like a place from the air, chances are it will look even nicer from the ground.
October has been a busy month with events in and out of work. It has been a spectacular month for weather in the Northeast, and unfortuantely I've been stuck inside for the bulk of it all.
This past week, I was invited out on a hiking trip, but considered not going because too much was going on in the District and I felt like I couldn't afford to miss a day of it - the election cycle was in full swing, and Ukrainian band Okean Elzy was in town for a rare show.
Thank God though that I took a moment's pause and thought about how it had been more than 15 months since I'd put my hiking boots on - way back in June of last year up in the Swiss Alps. I thought how insane that was that a person who used to go hiking every weekend and who thrived on fresh air hadn't been on a walkabout in almost a year and a half because he got stuck in a comfortable bubble, got really busy with a lot of things, and didn't want to venture out.
So yesterday, I broke free, canceled all plans and found myself above Shenandoah National looking out onto the multicolored canopy. Take some time to smell the falling leaves and remember what was really real in the world. In a banquet hall out in Kansas, from an airplane window, and there on the sunny summit of Mt. Robertson, I had found some sanity in America in October of 2010, if only for a moment.
Maybe the leaves block the sun and keep us from seeing the sky for blue. Perhaps that's why the end of the calendar year is always a good time for reflection.
Lucidity. Stability. Prudence. Common Sense. Reason. I wish these on the fleeting days of October, for November and beyond.
