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We made it.

Note for future reference: it takes more than one and a half hours to get from the front door of the Denver airport to gate B-84, even if you run.

Tomorrow’s flight leaves at 8:20 a.m.

Pray for us.

As planned:
Depart BWI 7:30 a.m., transfer in Chicago, arrive Missoula 12:30 p.m.

As it actually happened:
Depart BWI 6:55 a.m. via taxi.

Arrive Dulles 8:25 a.m.

Depart Dulles 12:55 p.m.

Arrive Pittsburgh @ 2:30 p.m.

Depart Pittsburgh @ 5:25 p.m.

Arrive Denver @ 8:15 p.m.

Check into hotel 9:30 p.m.

We’ll keep you posted.

…fixing up the house.

Bedroom ceiling

Before:

After:

Dining-room ceiling

Before:

After:

I also put a final coat of gloss black paint on the back steps today, but I don’t have a “before” picture. (A.’s dad primed them on Saturday.)

…because activism, citizenship and democracy ARE NOT ON THE TEST.

A. called me last night to let me know that she has reached Missoula and taken possession of our new residence.

Bird Camp is over. Everything is packed up and stowed, some of it in the new shed that A. built. Everyone is gone. The tents are down. Nothing left but trees and wind. And birds. A. didn’t get away until late Wednesday, and then only to Flagstaff. On Thursday, she and one coworker who is also headed back to Missoula departed Flagstaff in a Suburban. They expect to arrive in Missoula today.

Sal mops the floors where I work.

He vacuums the carpets and wipes the baseboards down. He empties the trash.

He cleaned up all the blood next door, in the hallway of the apartment building my boss owns. No one knows how it got there one night, three months ago, although this neighborhood becomes pretty lonely at night, a good place for junkies and prostitutes and anyone else whose preferred pastimes are best enjoyed with a low profile.

“Needles,” Sal told me. “Marijuana joints, too.” At first I couldn’t understand this last bit through his thick Filipino accent. “Roach!” he said, pinching his thumb and forefinger in front of his pursed mouth. “I see them on the front steps. In hall.”

His brother is a colonel in the U.S. Army; their father was a captain.

“Me,” he says, “I was a Major Problem.”

The office manager calls him “Mr. Sal.” She just calls me “Sutton.” I’ve wondered what the difference means. I sit at a desk and type on a computer all day. Sal cleans toilets and cuts the grass. Is calling him “Mr.” supposed to compensate for something, or is it just a way of holding him at arm’s length? [FN 1]

Sal doesn’t speak English very well; he’s also shy, although maybe that’s because he doesn’t speak English very well. I get embarrassed for him when he tries to talk to me, because I have to keep asking him to repeat himself, and the more he repeats himself, the more he mumbles, the more jumbled his pronunciations grow. But I figure the only way out for both of us is for me to make sure I understand what he’s trying to say. Down at the copier one day, in the course of one of these awkward exchanges, I finally understood him to be asking about Montana, where he knows I’m moving. He had looked it up on a map. He listed some of the states around it.

“What pretty place is there?” he asked, or that’s what I thought he asked. Eventually I understood that he was asking about parks and attractions, as in, what famous place would one visit there? I told him that Yellowstone was near Missoula, and that seemed to satisfy him. “Beautiful,” he said. “You are lucky.”

“Lots of mountains,” I added. He had told me that he was from the mountains in the Philippines. He asked if there were pine trees, and I took him up to my office to show him some pictures. “Beautiful,” he kept saying. “You must be looking forward.”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know if I would ever have decided to move out there on my own -” I was going to finish with something like “but now that we’re doing it, I’m really looking forward to it.”

But Sal interrupted before I could finish.

“To be with your wife!” he said. “Family first!”

I nodded.

“Like me,” he said. “I had a good job in the Philippines, but my wife wanted to come here, so I came here. I was in agriculture.” After a lot of misunderstandings and repetitions, I finally grasped that he had not been a farmer – he had been an official in the Filipino government agency that regulates veterinarians.

“That must be a hard switch,” I said.

He shrugged.

“Family first,” he said, before heading down the hall, a rag dangling from his fingers.

*****

Footnotes
FN 1: I don’t think this is related, but, around Baltimore town, they teach the children to address familiar adults – friends of the family, a tutor, etc. – this way. “Mr.” or “Ms.” and the first name. For some reason I hate the sound of it. Just like the office manager’s usage, it feels like a performance of respect, rather than the real thing. And in the case of the children who are made to do it, it feels like the respect is only required to flow in one direction: from younger to older. Watching a Baltimore mother whack her two-year-old as hard as she can on the rear in the supermarket, or listening to the foul-mouthed children in my neighborhood scream at each other, “respect” is not a word that comes to mind.

Some advice a lot of us would do well to remember.

Peter Post, great-grandson of Emily and author of several etiquette books, argued that laptops should be banned from the main meal, but are fine during coffee hour, when guests linger at the table conversing. “If you’re using the laptop to look something up in the context of a conversation, it’s really no different than going to a dictionary, and we certainly wouldn’t tell people not to do that,” he said. “The mistake would be checking your e-mail. The minute it becomes something personal, it’s the same as answering your cellphone.” A caveat: “Showing friends what I saw most recently on YouTube isn’t the first place I’d go in conversation. It seems to me that that’s starting to cross the line.”

Sorry my bird-camp posts grew so sparse. I’ll do better next year, when I’m not preparing a rental property/to move.

But just a brief update, for those of who you interest yourselves in A.’s whereabouts. The season has finished out satisfactorily – “not perfect, but okay,” she says, which probably means that any normal human being would look at the same evidence and say it turned out great – and A. leaves camp tomorrow. I can’t believe it’s over already. Seems like only yesterday when I was writing about her leaving Montana for Arizona, and now she’ll soon be on her way back. She hopes to reach Missoula by Friday evening, when she will take possession of our new residence. (Hope she likes it.)

That’s all I’ve got right now.

If you’d like, you can check out past Bird Camp posts here.