Denver
Denver was pretty quiet. Dave’s mother had three visitors: us, and Dave’s sister Jill. We went out to dinner twice with Jill and Elaine, and ate at home the other three days. Only one other Denver friend was in the area, a college pal of mine named Louis who has what I would call a dream job: sorting through old books at a recycling bin and deciding which ones can be sold for money or donated for right living. There’s a hierarchy in voluntary poverty which we will all be discovering shortly. The most powerful get to shuttle between Israel and Palestine and build habitats for humanity, others sort plastics from papers. Louis finds the bound minutes of Methodist Church Districts in the 18th century (how did they even make it to Colorado, let alone into the trash?) and donates them to theological seminaries.
Dave’s mother is quite old now and we will be visiting her more often.
On Monday we flew to California. The cost of the airport shuttle has gone from $18 to $25 during the summer. We should have bought those instead of even gold. Our shuttle driver was from Morocco and seemed terribly nervous. Another shuttle driver had just been arrested for what seems so far to be fairly thin evidence of a terror plot (peroxide bomb diagrams on his computer? better arrest Wikipedia), and I know that a lot of people in America regard Morocco and Afghanistan as pretty much interchangeable and Zakarias has to experience that prejudice.