​Come to think of it, many professions and trades require their practitioners to be licensed. This is true from psychotherapists and massage therapists to doctors, lawyers, accountants, beauticians, airline pilots, and many others. More generally, civilians in all 50 U.S. states are required to have driver’s licenses before they can take to the road in their vehicle. Even permission to practice driving with an instructor or licensed adult is de rigueur. But licensing adults?!

No, I’m not talking about a new soban or Thai-noodle fad diet here. Rather, the noodles in question are Styrofoam swimming noodles, the kind YMCAs and other health clubs seem to have in abundance. Ours, the Mapleton Y in Boulder, Colorado, has them in various diameters and buoyancy levels, square but mainly round, and in yellow, green, blue, and white. In fact, they just got a lovely new supply, since the old ones get a bit frayed around the edges and start looking rat-eaten. “Grab your noodles,” Roxanne, our former long-time chief district judge but now our Water Fitness instructor, will say, adding “and spread out.”

​Doctors are supposed to have patients—or at least patience till they have the paying kind. And I’m a doctor. Well, let’s be honest here. I’m not that kind of doctor. I’m a Ph.D. And if the faux acronym means “piled higher and deeper”—it really means Philosophiae doctor, one learned in philosophy, or love of wisdom—that which is piled higher and deeper is not hundred-dollar bills. My late mother once opined that with handwriting like mine, I could have been a real doctor and made real money. She also allowed as how, after I would bring home a date, “She’s a nice girl, dear, but you could do better.”..

​I woke up this morning with a Schnappsidee, the great German expression for the kind of inspiration that could (usually) only come from a few glasses too many of, well, schnapps. As it happened, the last alcohol I had had, other than hand sanitizer, was a rather good Coin Margarita two nights ago at one of Boulder’s premier Mexican restaurants. And that drink, for better or worse, had long since lost its potency for revelation...

A picture, especially a bad one, may not be worth a thousand words. But in a place as exotic as Borneo, I thought I’d do something different this week and tell our story in captioned pictures. Enjoy! Reynold Ruslan

​My wife, Cedar, and I had always wanted to have a Peace Corps-like experience. When we were younger, decades before we married, we were each too busy with our U.S.-based lives to consider going somewhere exotic to do something for the greater good. But in 2012, at ages 72 (me) and 67 (Cedar), we finally got our chance....

​In this corner of your mind, weighing in at 195 pounds, is Mr. Creed. In that corner, weighing in at a mere 125 pounds, is Ms. Deed. Make no mistake. This seemingly unequal fight for the future of the world has been going on inside each of us since time immemorial, the battle between the Better and the Worse Angels of our nature. Which side the majority of us are on will make all the difference. To be sure, there are right and wrong actions as well as true and false beliefs. But, in the end, beliefs form the neck which turns the head of action. For example, if you agreed with Donald Trump that the 2020 Presidential Election had been stolen, as many Americans still do, you might have been moved to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Beliefs lead to actions.

​Now if you asked how someone named Reynold Feldman could have a brother named Losuba, few would be surprised. That number would include me. So, here’s a little background. Around six years ago, a retired Episcopal priest attached to our parish contacted me with an unusual request. Before her retirement, she explained, she had worked with the South Sudanese emigré community in Minneapolis. Through them she learned of a very special South Sudanese expat named Losuba. Apparently, as a major general in his country’s army and a liaison to its Department of Defense, he had become a leader in the opposition to the corrupt government then in power. As such, he and his family had received credible death threats. So, his wife and children fled to another East African country while Losuba, hoping to gain political asylum and bring them over later, landed in the U.S. Now he was in our Boulder, Colorado area and needed a place to stay. Could he stay with us?

..​As I write this blog, it is Thursday afternoon, the 13th of May, 2021. This morning at 10 am Eastern Daylight Time, Margaret Vanderbeek Barstow, my wife Cedar’s mother Meg, was pronounced dead. According to the nurse on duty, she had probably passed a half hour earlier. Cedar had just finished at the dentist when she got the call. When she arrived at the Y, where we were both scheduled for one of our thrice-weekly water-fitness classes, she gave me a long hug and told me the news. I wasn’t surprised. I had expected Meg to leave around this time. But when the actual event happens, it’s still a shock. Swimming was helpful. After, we had an initial family Zoom call. Then, ninety minutes later, Dan, the youngest of the three Barstow siblings, set up a Zoom call from Jefferson House, the long-term-care facility that was Mother’s final home. “Long-term” is a kind of misnomer. She was there perhaps six weeks. Anyway, each of us on the call had a chance to see her no-longer-breathing body and say our final goodbyes...

​As I write these words, the recently declared cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians is holding but remains fragile. As an ethnic American Jew who is also a long-time Christian (Episcopalian), I wish my people when they created the modern state of Israel had approached things differently. Of course, Zionism came from the same 19th-century mindset as other ardent nationalisms, including alas Nazism: that is, it was a nationalist philosophy based on ethnic purity. Even David Ben Gurion, a major co-founder and early prime minister of 20th-century Israel and an otherwise visionary leader, said—incorrectly—that Israel was “a land without people for a people with a land.” The only problem was that, as in the Exodus story, there were people already there. In ancient times they were called Philistines. Now there were Palestinians. Okay: spoiler alert! The Arabic word for Palestinian is falustin. Yup! As Yogi Berra famously said, “Déjà vu all over again! These folks were getting misused yet again, this time by a very people who had lost a third of their world population in the Holocaust and should have known better...

​In 1902 Harvard professor, psychologist and philosopher William James—the older brother of the novelist Henry by one year—published his classic study, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Some 119 years later I am keying this blog on a much less lofty topic: the varieties of motel experience. No italics, no capital letters for the more important words. Still, there is something to be learned from the differences among motels across the U.S.

​On April 22, 2021, Margaret Vanderbeek Barstow, Meg, my wonderful mother-in-law, celebrated her 100th birthday. According to what I could find on Google, that is something that less than two-hundredth of one percent of Americans will achieve. And she did it in the midst of the Covid virus pandemic. Not surprisingly, she also came close to celebrating that monumental birthday in her own independent-living apartment at a senior residence in Hartford, Connecticut. Alas, she broke her hip a month before the big day and was now at a nearby long-term-care facility.

​In the spring of 2011, Cedar and I went on a wonderful six-week honeymoon trip to Spain, Turkey, and Morocco. People had given us monetary gifts for our wedding, so our travels were all but paid for. In Turkey we had a 17-day small-group tour with the Turkish singer and Sufi Latif Bolat, whom I had gotten to know at his concerts in both Honolulu and Boulder. In Spain we stayed in Orgiba, near Granada, at the Finca, or estate, of an old friend. In Morocco a highlight was three nights in a mansion belonging to my meditation brother Simon Guerrand-Hermès, the co-owner of the renowned couturier Hermès of Paris. There we were waited on hand and foot by a staff of seven and had a brief experience of living like the rich...

​In 2012 my wife, Cedar, and I spent the first six months of the year as volunteer teachers at an international school in Indonesian Central Borneo. So, what were an elderly Caucasian couple from Boulder, Colorado, doing in the middle of the jungle on the world’s third largest island? Well, she and I had always wanted to be Peace Corps volunteers, but the most we had managed were junior years abroad in the very tame wilds of Copenhagen, Denmark (Cedar) and Heidelberg, Germany (me). Now friends had established this English-language 1st-12th-grade private school outside the capital of Indonesian Central Borneo, or Kalimantan Tengah, where we went as volunteers...

​As I write these words, it’s a beautiful spring Monday afternoon here in Boulder, Colorado. It’s also Holy Monday, March 29, 2021. Holy Week began yesterday as always with Palm Sunday. Jesus’s followers, although technically they were ahead of him, waved palm fronds and threw down their coats and cloaks to cover the dusty dirt road to Jerusalem to honor the way for him and his borrowed white donkey. Fortunately, the committee in charge of naming religious holidays wisely decided against calling the start of Holy Week Coat or Cloak Sunday...

​Some of you know that learning foreign languages is my hobby. As I like to say, I can get into trouble in 12 languages and back out (more or less) in eight. But Danish? Okay. A little background. Some 15 months after my first wife died, a Danish friend invited me to visit her in Copenhagen. So I ended up spending three months there, the full time allotted on a visitor’s visa, from mid-January through mid-April, 2008. Now Danish, like English, Dutch, German, and the other Scandinavian languages, belongs to the Germanic family of tongues. Since I speak English and German fluently, I thought Danish would be easy to learn. Well, reading and writing are fairly straightforward. But speaking and understanding other people are a totally different matter. For unlike Spanish, German, Italian, Indonesian, even the romanizations of Japanese and Chinese Mandarin, Danish is unphonetic. In short, what you see on paper is not what you hear when certain words or parts of words are spoken...

​As a future English major, I was honored to have been admitted to English 25, back in 1956 Yale’s Honors English course for first-year students. I got to class early that first day and couldn’t wait to meet our instructor. When he walked in, however, I was taken aback. He was nothing like what I had expected. Although he had the requisite Harris Tweed jacket on, he seemed to me more like Disney’s Scrooge McDuck than a suave Yale professor. My disappointment deepened when he introduced himself. His Southern-inflected English was crammed full of strange idioms and bizarre mannerisms. And here I was waiting for terse New England cool. Decades later when I read Dick Cavett’s autobiography, Cavett, he recounts being taken by his roommate to a class taught by this professor, then spends the better part of the page describing the oddities of speech he experienced and learned to mimic...

​One of my favorite undergraduate professors was Yale’s Romantic Poetry expert, Frederick A. Pottle. Mr. Pottle—Yale professors were never called “doctor”—was a wiry New Englander in his 50s. He sounded a bit like Robert Frost when he spoke and was an old-fashioned Republican who believed it better for neighbors to do in-person charity than having a distant government dispense impersonal monthly checks. But the reason I bring him up at all is that, although he was our Romantics experts, he was known in the world as the editor of James Boswell’s 18th-century journals. I had begun reading these chronicles even before going to college. Boswell wrote that he used journaling to adjust his character as milady used her looking glass to adjust her appearance. He was also honest in writing about his triumphs and failures in life, and for a curious teenager there were some wonderfully salty parts...

​Had she lived, Simone would have turned 90 today, March 4, 2021. Fate had another date in mind, however: September 20th, 2006. On that day she died peacefully at home in our Honolulu apartment after a short bout with pancreatic cancer. She was 75 ½. Had she lived two months and ten days longer, we would have celebrated 43 years of marriage...

​She came when I was one and a half. She was supposed to stay for a year to give my mother some respite in caring for me. She had been Aunt Helen’s, Mother’s twin sister’s, maid. She must have been around 40 when she arrived at our house in Great Neck, Long Island. According to the family story—I don’t remember the actual event—I greeted her at the door with a big “Hel-lo, Florine!” That was it. She stayed with us until I was 16...

​Of the eight languages I have some competence in, French is near the bottom. These days, though, it may be moving up. The reason: my current French email correspondence and occasional Skype session with our lovely French goddaughter, Marie. So that’s perhaps the reason that the title for this week’s blog came to me in that language, and an important proverb it is: en anglais, LONG LIVE DIFFERENCE!

​I was fascinated from a young age by the possibility of life beyond our planet. This was decades before Carl Sagan came along with his “billions and billions of stars” and the mathematical probability that the human species was unlikely to be the lone set of sentient beings in the universe. So, not surprisingly, I read whatever I could about UFO sightings, especially on what later came to be known as “close encounters of the third kind.” In my middle years I even had lunch with the then chair of the Northwestern University Astronomy Department, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the most famous UFO researcher of his day.

​My dad, Jacob (“Jack”) Newton Feldman, was the child of East European immigrants. His father, Grandpa Paul, was a loveable scallywag from Romania who arrived at Ellis Island in 1898. I’ve written about him in an earlier blog. Dad’s mother, Ida Litzky Feldman, landed in New York City around the same time from Odessa, Ukraine. The daughter of a scribe who meticulously copied Torah scrolls and was considered a holy man because of his daily proximity to the Word of God, Grandma Ida was a by-the-book Orthodox Jewish woman who raised her three sons to be the same. Dad was the oldest. She failed with all three.

​Life may be a cabaret, old chum, but for me it’s a Camino. So what’s a Camino? With a small “c” it’s simply a way, path, or road. It may even be the Spanish translation of the Daoist concept of the Tao. Dictionaries don’t help here, and there’s no one around I can ask. But with a capital “c” the word refers to the Pilgrimage Way of St. James the Apostle, which starts at various spots all over Europe and concludes in Northwestern Spain at the Cathedral of St. James (Santiago) in a city called Santiago de Campostela (St. James of the Starry Field) in the Province of Galicia. 

​In my 81 years on the planet, I’ve been blessed to have known my share of characters. None, though, tops my paternal grandfather, Paul (Pincus) Feldman, who died when I was 14. Grandpa Paul came to this country in the 1890s from Galati (pronounced “Galatz”), near the Black Sea in Romania. He and his boyfriend, both 19, landed on Ellis Island, where their adventure began. The Jewish community in Denver was short two males over the age of 13 to complete their minyan, or religious quorum, and make it possible for them to arrange their conference calls to God. (It would have been assumed in those days that all Jewish men over 13 would have been bar mitzvah.) The Denverites had pooled their money and transmitted it to a Jewish charity in New York City with the request that they send the first two Jewish greenhorns over 13 with no place to go to Colorado. God was getting impatient! So, they pinned tickets on the boys’ jackets, took them to Penn Station, and off they went to what Grandpa always called “Calarada, Denver.”