Good Grief! Here it is the middle of November and time for another Grimm (or grim) Greeting. My "form letters" have dropped off this year since we, at least as a family, have not gone anyplace since we returned from the u.s. last January. However, everyone but me (all together now - pooor Jack) has been someplace.
The big news this year was Dwight leaving home to go off to Stanford University. (That's another reason why it's pooor Jack). He left here in mid September to fly back to California and the funny part is that from the time he was notified that he had been accepted I kidded him about being in San Francisco for the "next big one." One day I told him I wanted him to wear a life jacket while he was going to school and he looked at me as if I were nuts and asked why. I told him so when the big one hit and California slid into the ocean that he'd be prepared. Stanford had a lot of orientation courses for incoming freshmen and we told him one of those should be "earthquake survival." So, we all, including Dwight, saw some humor in the fact that the quake hit less than a month after he arrived. I guess Dwight was chuckling about it during the day and when asked by his fellow students why, he explained that his nutty father had warned him about that happening and it did. Stanford is between San Francisco and Santa Cruz (which I think was the center) but there was apparently no major damage. All of the buildings survived though Dwight heard that every book in the library (5-7 million books) fell off the shelves. We have a satellite dish at work on which we can get CNN news, so I watched the news for sometime that day and since I heard no reports of any damage at Stanford, we were not panic-struck. However, it was a relief when Dwight called that night. Just before he called us, some of the staff 'from the newspaper called him and interviewed him and then ran the interview and his picture on the front page of the paper. We sent Dwight a copy, which is now posted in his dorm to the amazement of other students.
Dwight is studying hard and is doing OK - maybe not great, but he has a heavy load and at least one hard subject (Calculus). I expect maybe next term will be a bit easier. He does have a little time for fun - he plays coed touch football! and inner-tube water polo went on a scavenger hunt into San Francisco (pre-quake) and has gone to some of the Stanford football games. Dorothy doesn't think you are supposed to have fun at college, but I told her that her experiences were not realistic. Her first two years were at an all-girls college in the deep south in the early 60's and her last two years were at George Washington University in Washington D.C. while she lived at home. So she has a distorted view of what university life is like. It's probably just as well for Dwight that he's 10,000 miles away.
Speaking of distances, Alice seems a lot further away from civilization thanks to a nationwide pilot's strike that started in early August. When the government and the airlines threatened legal action, all 1600 domestic pilots resigned. Since then the airlines have refused to deal with the pilots federation since in effect the pilots no longer work for them. This situation continues. The airlines are slowly hiring pilots on a contract basis and we now have a few regularly scheduled flights, but nothing like it used to be and in the 3 1/2 months this has been going on the tourist industry in this country has been devastated. Some estimates are that it will require five years for the industry to rebuild. When Dwight left town he had to take the train to Melbourne to catch a plane. Even a month from now when we come back to the U.S., again, for a visit, I couldn't ~et the flight out of Alice Springs that I wanted. It'll be next year before the flights get back to something approaching normal.
So Dwight had a big trip even if it was one way. Toby is in a children's choir here called the Alice Springs Junior Singers, and during a one-week school break in October they chartered a bus and went to South Australia where they put on a number of concerts and did some sightseeing. Toby's two goals were to eat as many McDonald cheeseburgers (we don't have a McDonalds here) as possible and to look for comic book shops in Adelaide. He did have some McDonald cheeseburgers and someone was nice enough to get him to a comic book shop where he stocked up. It worked out well - he bought enough to keep a late of kids absorbed for many hours during the long bus ride back to Alice Springs (about 18 hours).
Toby is doing reasonably well at school - without overextending himself. His main pastimes otherwise are bowling, collecting comics, and this year we was on a table tennis team with a friend of Dwight’s. Their team won 1st place, so Toby was pleased about that.
He doesn't seem to miss Dwight, I suspect in large part because the 1ate end of June, his best friend in the world, returned to Alice Springs and is living directly across the street. For the first couple of months I rarely saw him. This boy was the first kid that Toby met the day we arrived in Alice in 1981 and took Toby to school the first day and they have been best friends ever since, no matter where they are in the-world.
As for Dorothy's trips, during the early part of the pilot's strike, the Northern Territory govt. came up with this scheme to subsidize tour packages for Territory residents in order to save some of the tour groups that were about to fold. Dorothy got one of the vouchers that the govt. was circulating and took a trip to a place called King's Canyon. The tour involved a lot of uphill walking and Dorothy thought she might die, but survived it. She wasn't overly impressed and said she didn't have to go back. She had a better trip recently when she got to fly to Ayers Rock on a new air service that Australian Airlines is starting. She left Saturday, was treated to accommodations and meals that night and flew back the next day. She said she really enjoyed seeing Yulara, which is the community that is growing about 10 miles from the Rock, after all the tourist facilities were disbanded in the immediate vicinity of the Rock itself. She had a very good dinner and some very interesting discussions with some of the other people who had been invited on the tour.
Otherwise Dorothy continues to cover numerous art exhibits, plays, fashion shows, school activities, etc. She still occasionally makes a guest appearance at home. She is on call more than a doctor. I sometimes threaten to unhook the phone because people think nothing of calling her at home at all hours to ask her to cover something. I had thought about a telephone answering service, but would hate our parents or Dwight to reach that.
I too was an indirect victim of the pilot's strike. After worrying and making plans for months to hold the Federal Conference of the Australian-American Association here in October, we had to cancel it because I didn't think the people from Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, etc, would ride a bus or train, or drive here to attend. The planning had caused me a lot of distress, and finally when it seemed that we had our act together and the conference might be a success, the pilots pulled their stunt. It was very disappointing.
The furthest I have been since last January was to a tourist lodge called Glen Helen, about 100 miles from town. Dorothy and I were invited to a wedding here in town after which everyone was invited £0 go to Glen Helen for a reception and then everyone was planning to spend the night. It turned out to be very good timing, because that week the restaurant there had won the top award in a nationwide competition with other tourist restaurants. When the newspaper found out that Dorothy was going there anyway, she was asked to do a feature on the restaurant, so it all worked out well. The restaurant is not something you would expect in the outback of Australia, with china and silverware and very exotic dishes actually too exotic for us. But it was an interesting experience, we had a nice e~ening, spent the night and drove back to town the next day. Dorothy did a very nice feature for the Lodge, and in particular the restaurant. That has been the big event on my social calendar this year.
For the third year in a row, we will be returning to the U.S. for "rest and relaxation" over the Christmas holidays, to see our parents on the east coast, and Dwight, who will meet us there. Oh boy, I can hardly wait for those 5-mile backups on the Jersey Turnpike waiting to pay tolls, or maybe another snowstorm like 1 drove through last year to get to my parents' house, or maybe some sub-zero weather like we had the year before. Too much of that kind of R&R could kill you. This is more like an endurance test/giant shopping trip.
That's it for now. If anything exciting beyond those things I already mentioned happen on our trip home, you may be lucky enough to get another of these letters in the near future.
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