The Blind Woman and the Ironman

        The Blind Woman and the Ironman         

   I have had some wins and losses as I have made my way through life the game of life but the one accomplishment that I will always be proud of is my 34 year marriage to Tracey.  We have weathered the storm together and have taken a lot of hits over the years.  For example, we lost all four of our parents before we turned 60.  Now that all of the hard years are over, and we are transitioning to an easeful retirement, we get the best versions of each other.  No longer are we career driven or overachieving but instead are relaxed and at peace with the way our lives have turned out.  When Tracey was a lawyer and I was a teacher we both had a strong sense of purpose but I think that we are happier now than at any other time in our lives.

   I was initially attracted to Tracey because she is so smart, having learned how to navigate her world in spite of being blind, and because she was so much sophisticated than I was.  For example, she taught me words like ‘trousseau’ and opened up new worlds for me by making me look differently at things.  Her parents kept a Lincoln bed in their guest room and Tracey had to explain to me that the old saying of ‘sleep tight’ meant that a bed like that was held together with ropes and a special key was need to tighten those ropes every once in awhile.  These are small things but when put in the aggregate they made me realize that I was marrying up.  

   Part of my attraction to Tracey is that she is so vulnerable but maintains a positive mental attitude to get her across all of the obstacles that life has thrown at her.  Before we had even met I had heard about the blind girl who had joined the Louisville Jaycees, a community and service group who had organized a haunted house, and the first time that I saw her she was painting the walls of the house black.  It was her positive mental attitude that was so attractive to me.  What she could do, she did, when she could have spent her life on the sofa and watching television.  No one would have blamed her for becoming a shut in because of her handicap.  Instead, she was helping to raise money for a local charity and she was attending college.  

   The first time that I talked to Tracey was when we were taking a break from fixing up the Haunted House.  It was still summer so we were all hot and sweaty.  Tracey was paint splattered and covered in dust from her job.  When I saw her walk through the door and towards the group who had gathered in the courtyard, she had a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other and I thought to myself, ‘that’s the girl for me.’  

   While we were still dating, Tracey was finishing up her undergraduate degree from Bellarmine while I was at the University of Louisville and working towards my certification to become a teacher.  When were were first married I was doing my student teaching and Tracey went to Spalding University to get her masters.  These were the hard years.  As I started my first real teaching job, we decided to buy a house and then had three children in quick succession.  Tracey had always wanted to be an attorney and decided to go to law school while the children were still young.  I supported her all of the was and one of my proudest moments was listening to my wife as she gave the commencement speech for her graduating class.  In return, Tracey supported me with the crazy hours that I put in to training for eleven Ironman competitions.

   Now the hard years are over and we can travel like we always wanted to do.  Our trips overseas are our reward for finishing our careers on a good note.  Some couples may find it daunting to spend so much time together but that really hasn’t been an issue for us because we know each other so well.  We both can be touchy and we both know when to give the other some space.  And because we travel so well together we have been to places and done things that others can only dream of.  We have climbed the pyramids in Egypt, fed elephants in South Africa, driven a Yugo through the streets of Belgrade, and floated through the Panama Canal.  Our future plans include visiting places that we never would have tried to tackle individually; Greece, Ireland, England, and South East Asia are on our list.  I am not saying that we deserve our storybook retirement but because we have a strong marriage and a desire to live life to its fullest, we are going to appreciate everything that we have.

Paris, France

    The thing about travel is that you never know what you are going to to see or what hardships you are going to have to endure to experience the new memories of our daily lives.  For example, we took an Uber from our condo and arrived at the airport at 4:30 on Saturday for our 6:30 flight to Paris.  Travel is an ordeal, in spite of the fact that we flew throughout the night without incident, and we met the SS Joie de Vivre, our hotel on a ship, at 2:00 pm on Sunday.  It made me feel good that Carmine Esposito was truly glad to see us and hugged us as we arrived on the ship.  Tracey and I were completely overwhelmed after 18 hours of a travel day.  What we wanted, more than anything else, was to meet up with the University of Louisville Travel Group, as we prepared ourselves for the trip of a lifetime as we navigated through the cauldrons of history that is France.

   Our first real day of travel began on Monday, March 24, as we travelled to the medieval castle of La Roche Guyon.  Our tour was good for what it was and we spent a lot of time listening to Patricia, our guide for the day.  She liked to “gab, gab, gab” while describing the intricacies of the castle, but her narrative was less than inspiring.  Stephanie was our guide in the afternoon and she led us through the Chateau Gaillard, or the old castle that was situated above the Seine River.  It was beautiful but I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were stalling; waiting for the opportunity to visit the sights of Paris, France.  Carmine wanted to save the best for last.
   Most of the travel group drove to Mont Saint Michael on Tuesday, March 25, but Tracey and I made the hard decision to skip this excursion because the bus trip was too long.  Instead, we took a walking tour of the medieval city of Rouen.  Pascalla was our guide.  The highlights of the tour included the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Joan of Arc Church, and the Market Square.  The main topic of conversation was how the French government had decided to move the retirement age from 62 to 64.  As we were leaving Rouen, thousands of protesters were entering the old city to dispute the new retirement age, and we later learned that they broke out some windows in the Market Square and they set fires in front of the church and the cathedral.  Tracey and I decided to stay on the ship for the whole afternoon to avoid the protestors and their vandalism.
   Honfleur is the old port city that sits on the Seine estuary to the English Channel.  It was a beautiful day as Barbara, our guide, showed us the historic parts of the city that are so interesting to the tourists.  We have done a lot of trips and I don’t ask a lot from these excursions; all that I want is a good guide who will show us interesting places that are new to me.  Honfluer fit the bill as the place and Barbara was the perfect guide as she blended facts with a lot of humor to make the tour more interesting.  I took a lot of pictures which I immediately posted on Facebook because that is immensely satisfying to me.
   I have been reading about D Day and the Normandy invasion since I was in middle school so I knew all about the Utah and Omaha beach landings but I never dreamed that I would actually be there.  Utah Beach was well preserved and looked exactly like it did when when our heroes landed there in 1944.  When we took our tour we saw the statues and other memorials that had been placed just off of the beach.  The people who had built a memorial even included a Higgins’ boat that the tourists could walk in to.  A museum has been built off site and it included restored Jeeps, a glider, and a C-47 plane.  Life-like mannequins were dressed up in full uniforms and it was a little eerie to take their picture.  At Pointe du Hoc, where the Rangers climbed steep cliffs to take the German command posts and artillery pill boxes, so that our infantry could land on the beaches more easily.  We visited the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach which contains rows of 2,000 white crosses, a beautiful chapel, and a huge statue that is entitled “The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves.”  Our first stop on our D Day Tour was to see the “Les Braves on Omaha Beach” steel statue which has been cemented in the sand.  Barbara led us through a prayer service, through which she had hired a trumpeter to play “Taps” while we were given a rose to place at the foot of the statue or to place in the waves on the beach.  All five of our stops on Thursday showed that the Americans can build memorials with class and reverence; that we can rise to the occasion when it is important to do so.  
   I taught world history at Sacred Heart for twenty six years and in those years I always taught a unit on the French Revolution.  This chapter of history is important to me as I took a whole class on the revolution at the University of Louisville.  It was 1989, or the two hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, and Dr. Weisbach was my teacher and all of the memories of the lessons that I have learned from that class, and that I have used in my lesson plans for 26 years of teaching history, came alive to me as we toured the Palace of Versailles, the cost of which spurred on the revolution.  Tracey and I signed up for the apartment tour which gave us some alone time with the more intimate artifacts of the French monarchy.  Afterwards our guide, Aurilie, had us join the masses in the main section of the building, where we saw the famous “Hall of Mirrors,” the exact place where, after the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck founded the nation of Germany.  The portraits of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette were on display and this was quite a treat for me because I had been using those pictures as examples of French power and wealth for years.  One of the reasons why we take these trips is because it is impossible to describe the opulence and majesty of Versailles; you simply have to visit the place in order to appreciate it’s grandeur.  
   For our last day in Paris we decided to burn the candle at both ends by doing a tour of the city in the morning, the Louvre in the afternoon, and the Moulen Rouge in the evening.  Our city tour acted as a good primer for the history and architecture of Paris.  This overview was helpful because we intend to revisit the city to tour the highlights of what we have missed.  Paris is overwhelming but our appetite has been whetted for another trip to the City of Lights.  The Louvre was also overwhelming that we could not see all of the artifacts in one day so our guide, Joshua, narrowed our experience to seeing the the “three ladies,” which are the “Mona Lisa,” the “Venus di Milo,” and the “Winged Victory.”  I was distracted by the beauty of these works and, as we were leaving, Tracey said to me, “it is not crying if the tears don’t come out.  Right?”  What my blind wife meant was that she was close to having a nervous breakdown because the huge crowds at the Louvre were depriving her of room to maneuver, so she had to cling to me.  All of her skills in mobility were useless to her as we were packed into the rooms much like sardines in a tin can.  Also, the staircases and the constant escalators are difficult for blind people to navigate and the Louvre had a series of both of these things.  Tracey always makes mobility look so easy that I sometimes forget how difficult it is to be handicapped in these public buildings.  
   I didn’t have any expectations for the Moulen Rouge because I didn’t know anything about it aside from the 2001 Nicole Kidman movie, which I hated.  I could tell that this was going to be a premiere event even before entering the theater because the tickets were so expensive and the patrons were so well dressed; it was a high society crowd.  When we first walked in I was reminded of the dinner theaters from the 1950s, highlighted in The Godfather II movie, and I expected Frankie, Dino, and Sammy, to make an entrance at any minute.  The dinner menu was impressive and I am sure that it earned a five star Michelin rating.  It would be reductive to describe the show as merely a display of “tits and ass,” although that was a big part of what we saw, but we also witnessed the dancers in beautiful costumes who were fully engaged with the crowd.  Aside from the burlesque, we also saw a woman who swam in a huge water tank filled with snakes, a roller skating duet, acrobats, and two male power lifters whose specialty was strength and balance.  The show was better than anything that the Cirque du Soleil could offer in Las Vegas and our excursion to the Moulen Rouge offered a strong finish to our memorable trip to Paris.