It is my great pleasure to choose NanW as the WTF-er of the month!


Nan,
Please tell us one of the most interesting places you have been, and what you liked best about it.

And include pictures if possible!

Susan, thank you so much!

I hope everyone will ask plenty of questions – serious, silly, whatever. I’ll answer anything!

Susan, I love to travel -- it was hard to choose one place. So I thought about why travel appeals to me. It’s the experience of being or living in a place, the atmosphere, what it looks and smells like, what I do there. The best places are the ones that have a lasting effect, or change my life in some way.

Every August we’d pack up, hitch the trailer to the station wagon, and take off from LA. Sometimes to the south, Alabama, to visit my mom’s family. Seven days of driving, in a car with no air-conditioning, pulling a trailer, with 2 parents, 3 kids and a dog. One year we went to Buffalo for a reunion with my dad’s family. It was great to get some sense of what the rest of the country was like, all before I was a teenager.

I liked it best though when we went camping, usually up north to Yellowstone.

We’d start out in the evening, to get through a lot of the desert when it was cooler. There’d be days of driving, with not much to do except scenery watch, which I now love to do. I have very vivid memories. Like the sight of a long, straight highway ahead, with hills at the horizon, and then you’d get past those and there’d just be more long straight road stretching away. Or like one day going through the desert when it was thunderstormy – the unusual coolness, the huge mountains of black clouds, the lightning, the very loud noise of the rain. At night, we’d sometimes just pull over at the side of the road, and spend the night in the trailer there. There was almost no other traffic during the night, but occasionally there’d be a car or truck and you’d hear the swoosh of it coming and then going past, while you were falling asleep. That’s still one of the most relaxing sounds in the world for me!

We always went to the same campground, Specimen Creek, at the northwest corner actually a bit outside the park. It was about 25 miles from the nearest town, and fairly primitive, so most of the time during the week we’d be the only people there. We’d set up the trailer, a tarp stretched out in front to make a shady area, and then a tent for my parents.



One year my two sisters and I climbed the mountain nearby, and planted a flag at the top (a long stick with a dishtowel tied to the top). Here’s the view:



We spent a lot of time playing in the creek:



And we did the usual Yellowstone things, like the geysers.

But the real reason for going was because my dad liked to fish. Tied his own flies, everything. There were trails heading way back into the wilderness behind the campground, following the creek. So we’d walk along, stopping to fish every so often. We’d walk through meadows, then climb over scree when the trail skirted the mountain. Then there’d be a sudden change to that eerie kind of forest stillness when we’d go from meadow into woods. And we could look for wild strawberries.


The three of us kids would have to amuse ourselves while my dad fished, but we’d always find something:



And then, of course, rainbow trout never ever tastes as good as it did, grilled in a pan on a campfire, just a few hours after it was caught.

Do you still camp? Where?
What is your favorite opera. When and where did you see it?

Chas, no I don’t camp anymore. Odd in a way since it was such a standout childhood experience for me. I did spend a lot of my vacations in England hiking in the Lake District or Scotland, and we went to the Scottish Highlands on our last trip over there, but none of that was camping out.

I’ve kind of thought nostalgically that we should go, because I wanted the Bean to have the same wonderful experiences I had. And I'd still like to show him Old Faithful.

But I finally came to realize you have to give your kid his own version. Something that works for him as a very 21st century kid, with no siblings, and with parents who enjoy different kinds of things than my or Mr. Nan’s parents did.

Both of us have ties to Britain and like history, art and architecture. So once we started being able to afford vacations, that’s what we did, with input from the Bean and consideration of his age and tolerance level. We’ve been to London, Scotland, Paris. With plenty of visiting relatives in Northern California, and trips to Disneyland/World thrown in. We’ve been thinking more about more domestic destinations recently, but one day maybe we’ll do the trip I want to make to Germany and Switzerland to see the places that my family is from.

Ha, I just asked the Bean -- when he is an adult, what little things about our vacations will he remember, like I remember the cups we always used in the trailer, or getting a new block of ice for the icebox every couple of days.

His reply?

"Room service."

There's the difference between my childhood and his!

(I tried to make this short, really I did.)

Favorite opera – hmm, I’ve actually only seen a handful.

Magic Flute I love. So singable (shower, parking lot, anywhere!). The Ingmar Bergman film is a gem, except that it’s in Swedish.

But for a live production, it’s hands down the Ring cycle that I saw at Covent Garden in 1976.

I was on my way to England to study. Took cheap charter flights, so I got to spend almost a week in Zurich, soaking up everything Germanic (related to what I was studying). Then I had two weeks in London to tourist around like crazy.

On an escalator in a Piccadilly Line tube station, I saw a poster for a new production of the Ring. I had never seen an opera in my life, knew little about it and less about Wagner. But it was “Germanic”, and here was my chance. Not sure how I knew there would be cheap tickets.

I went to Rheingold, and a few days later Walküre, sitting in the slips, for I think about £2. Not a great view, so for the last two I got standing tickets. Yes indeedy, 8 hours of walking around London, then 6 hours of standing. No wonder I only weighed 7 stone!

They were pretty strict about the standing, too -- you had to be right up against the wall behind you (very back of the main floor), and you couldn’t sit. When the Woodbird started singing in Siegfried I was so entranced I stepped forward and only realized it when an usher started bearing down on me with a stern look.

My German has never been that good, but there were very good program notes, and the music is so emotionally evocative that knowing the outline of the story was enough. In terms of set and staging, it was a fantastic production.

The “floor” of the stage was actually a square platform set on some kind of motorized mechanism. It could be flat, or tilt in a number of directions, or turn. For the Rhine maidens, they had it tilted front edge up, with mirrors on the bottom, and the singers down below in a watery-river type of set -- the main floor audience actually saw them reflected in the mirror. For the gods going up into Valhalla at the end, it tilted the other way and became slats, like steps.

All the movement was very unobtrusive, part of the drama. When the curtain went up at the start, it was almost dark, then you heard that long low E-flat and the stage platform started rising, slowly, and turning, all the while you’re seeing a bit more light and hearing more waves of music on that one sound, so primeval, and then it tilted up to show the Rhine -- I get chills up my spine just thinking about it.

And that’s what opera should be, music, drama, staging all of a piece and working together in one big spectacle.

A few weeks later, I met a few people who had also gone. One of them on the same night as me, we realized, because we both saw Hagen take one step back too far and fall off the stage. (He got right back up.)

Nan, your description made me for just once think I might ever at least go see one piece of opera. (As long as OT's not in it in his ADQ get up.)

So, what made you decide on the pseudonym "The Bean" for your kid?

You get a free, all-expenses-paid weekend in one of these cities. Which would you pick (and why): Buffalo, Toledo or Saginaw?

What was you favorite subject in high school?

Do you have any siblings, and if so, how many of either sex?

If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we? Could we?

So, what made you decide on the pseudonym "The Bean" for your kid?

It’s his nickname, and it seemed easiest to go with that.

I gave him dozens of nicknames when he was a kid, some of which didn’t last very long, (like “Giblet” when we were doing the ultrasound before he was born). There were so many that at one point my sister said “you should start calling him by his real name more, or he won’t know what it is!”

Sweetpea morphed into Sweetbean, I think first because of Mr. Nan (who was a stay at home dad the first year) and that was shortened to “the Bean” when we talked about him to each other. I don’t think we started using “Bean” as the form of address directly to him until he was well into grade school.

I think of him as “string bean” sometimes now, because he is so skinny now that he has taken up track in school.

Do you have any siblings, and if so, how many of either sex?

I have two sisters, one a couple years older, who is an urban planner and avid birdwatcher, and one a year younger, who has a federal government job (and was very happy there was no gov’t shutdown last month).

Neither of them lives near me, which I am less and less happy about as we grow older. They both live in much areas of the country than me, though – warmer, prettier, more things to do.

When we were younger, the younger sister and I looked so much alike, and dressed alike often enough, that people thought we were twins. See the first picture above. We look very different now.

What was you favorite subject in high school?

I didn’t have one! There was nothing that really stood out, or that I was better at. And no teacher that made the things I like now come alive. Which made it very hard to decide on a major in college the first time. But then, they don’t teach philology, linguistics, or historical linguistics at the high school level -- and mostly didn't at the undergrad level at that time.

I wish I’d had the opportunity to do Latin in high school. I think I would really have liked it. And a better German teacher would have helped a lot.

I did really enjoy the music classes -- glee club and choir. I had a pleasant voice, though not a very loud one, but I was very good at being an alto. The choir director pushed us to do interesting and challenging things.

Not to mention that we got to sing at Disneyland at Christmas time. Which included time to visit the park afterwards and a packet of admission and rides tickets for the next time you went.

If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we? Could we?

We might want to. But only because we were thinking that doing it again is the same as doing it over. Which it’s not, because the second time it’s not the same us doing it. So we couldn’t.

Your favorite places or things to do in London?

So how is life with Sparky?

Nan - you have so delightfully presented yourself. I've really enjoyed this thread.

I always thought a book of pertinent Latin vocabulary would be a great thing to have.. I could do without the conjugations, convolutions and translations of ancient texts. (my dad taught Latin and Greek)..

anyway.. thanks for a great thread.

It's been a few months (since fall?)

... I hope Mr. Nan is continuing to do well.