Month: June 2026

One day about eight years ago, my son Ivan and I went into convenience store near my condo in San Diego.  I knew he didn’t have much money, so I was surprised when he bought a sandwich, because he could have eaten for free when we got to my place in a few minutes.  When we left the store he handed the sandwich to a man outside who had clearly been living on the street a long time.  

He told me he always tried to do that whenever he had any money to spare. He knew the distance between him and that man was not that great, and the difference was that he had me to protect him.  I remember how proud I felt to have raised a son with so much empathy and desire to turn that into action.

Ivan is gone now, off discovering what happens after we leave this earth, but the lesson he taught me that day has stuck with me.  When I see people down on their luck outside a grocery store, I buy a sandwich for them.  I leave a 20% tip for servers who did no more than hand me a muffin, because I know they might be worried about making their rent.  Every time, it brings Ivan’s spirit close to me, and that feels so good.

I had an interesting experience today walking home from the gym.  I had stopped to pick up a sandwich for lunch and I passed two men, both obviously down on their luck, one quite old for a street person and the other probably not yet out of his twenties. Both had the look of people for whom life had not gone right for a long time.  I walked past, but within a few steps, Ivan’s essence surrounded me so palpably that I stopped walking. “I can keep it. It’s my lunch,” I argued with myself for just a few seconds, but I knew what I had to do.

I walked back and offered the sandwich to one of the men, He was nearly toothless and his clothes had not been washed in a long time. He took the sandwich, looked at it for a moment and handed it back.  “You see that guy,” he said pointing to the other man. “I’m okay.  He needs it more than I do.”

The younger man took it with grateful enthusiasm, and a bit of shock at the kindness, which he erroneously attributed to me.  I wish I had pointed to the first man and said, “He’s the one who gave it to you,” but I wasn’t quick enough for that. The rest of the way home I thought about who the Laurel was who had argued even for a moment, how the old man’s act of loving kindness far surpassed my own, and how it really had been Ivan who set the whole thing in motion.

I have my doubts about altruism.  Most of my good deeds have the immediate reward of ego gratification.  I’m pretty good at hitting the tip percentage button without giving it a thought, because Hindu teaching says that the minute you congratulate yourself for a good deed, the benefit to your soul is negated.  To act well without feeling proud of oneself is the key to spiritual progress. Maybe I’ll get there some day, but for now, I’ll listen to my son and just try to do my best. 

For those of you who don’t know, I made a decision six years ago to get rid of everything I couldn’t fit in my car, and to move, sight unseen and knowing no one, from San Diego to Victoria.  I didn’t know if it would work out, but I figured if it didn’t, I would try something else. Optimism and resilience seem to be hard-wired in my personality.

 I imagine most of us had those times during Covid when we thought about what we wanted our lives to look like when we could live them more fully again.  I had lived in San Diego almost my entire life, having moved there as a teenager in 1964, and except for time away at university, had never left. My entire career was there, I raised my family there, I had a deep base of friends, and I rarely needed GPS to hurtle down freeways headed anywhere in in town.  I knew where to find the cheapest gas, the best tacos, the secret places to park.   

The problem for me was that I couldn’t picture how I was going to continue to grow. I was retired by then, and though I knew I would get back to cruising eventually, every new activity I considered for the times I would be home bored me to think about. There wasn’t any book I wanted to write, no hobby or sport I wanted to take up, no organization I wanted to volunteer with.  My post-Covid life was going to be the same old same old, and it was eating at me.  I always need to be on the move.  I need stimulation.  I want to take my last breath thinking “wow, this is an interesting development!” 

And so I decided to throw myself into my future and head north. I will always be grateful for the opportunity Covid gave me to be solitary, to explore the beauty of my new home on my own, but also for the way it kept me focused on the few friends in my bubble.  Without Covid, I would probably have made more acquaintances, but the caring community I now enjoy has its roots in that time of interdependence. 

Several times over the years, I pondered the question of what I would do if I became seriously ill or disabled. I have almost no family, so I can’t start there in my thinking. I had a deeply rooted community in San Diego I knew I could rely upon to help, and for a while I thought I would probably move back.   Then, as more time passed and my friendships grew more solid in Victoria, I realized there’s a lot of love here, and I indeed do have a community I could count on.  Now it is clear to me that I would stay right here.

That’s huge.  Nearly sixty years in one place and six in another, and they are increasingly equally dear.  But they will always be different.  Earlier this month, when I was in San Diego to promote Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel, it was so gratifying to see dozens of people I care about, many of whom I haven’t seen for years. I saw people I have known since high school, and others from my first job teaching at San Diego State. I saw people I have known since I was at UCSD in my thirties, and from San Diego City College, where I spend the majority of my career.  There were writer friends, tennis friends, old neighbors, and so many others. 

Here, I have only a fraction of that number, of course.  But the truth is I don’t think most people can really pay adequate attention to more than a few friends anyway. I have a core of people who matter a lot to me, and I to them. When I had a private launch party for Aloha a few weeks back, almost everyone I invited—about 35—showed up. I have friends beating the bushes for me to get the word about my new book out in the community. When I am going or coming from a trip I always have more than one person volunteer to take me to or from the airport, and since it’s forty minutes away, that’s special!

For me, friends are family. I was reminded of that in San Diego, and I came home to Victoria to a welcome that said that I indeed have another family here.  When it comes to what I value, I lost nothing by hopping in my car and coming north.  I had no idea what abundance awaited me for taking that chance. 

With Megan and Eva and Tom, who refuse to let me refer to them as landlords, so I now call them the people who live upstairs in MY house

As often happens, I get so busy with other things that I forget I have a website. I made a date with myself some time ago to get back to blogging, and I kept moving the date forward on my calendar as life intervened, but today is the day that I can finally surface. 

It’s been a whirlwind since the start of the year.  Over the holidays I was on a long cruise assignment on Silver Muse that didn’t end until early February.  When I got home, I had my first true vacation in years, lounging in Mexico. I hear some of you saying that I have a lot of nerve talking about no vacation time, since I spend about half the year on cruise ships, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that yes, cruises are vacations for guests, and I do have a lot of free time to go ashore in wonderful places, and I get to enjoy all the activities and amenities onboard luxury ships, but it’s work for me.

I always spend months before an assignment putting together 45-minute lectures that focus for around 15 minutes on what there is to do and see in port, and the rest of the time delve into the history, culture, important people, and other significant things about each stop. A typical assignment takes months of prep time. I am fully prepared when I step onboard, but I am laser-focused on delivering as close to a perfect talk as I can.  This means that I review each talk multiple times, adding and deleting material, looking for better images if I am not happy with what I have, and spending a little time working with the production crew to make sure everything goes smoothly with the slides and the audio. Honestly, I rarely feel completely at rest since there is always some preparation I want to do.

The other part of being a cruise lecturer is my public visibility onboard.  The minute I step out of my room, I become a performer of a role. Everything, from getting a cup of coffee, to going to the gym, to sitting in another lecture, to playing a game, or having a meal is an opportunity for others to observe me.  I don’t mind this at all, because I like the role, but it does mean that in this sense, I am always at work.

So now, as I go through the year 2026, I have gotten to March.  I was home in Victoria for all of March and into April, but my new novel Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel was coming out in May, and I had what felt like a thousand things to do in preparation for all the promotion that goes with a new book.

If I had known when I published my first novel, The Four Seasons, that having an in-house publicist meant I would have roughly one month of part-time effort from a junior publicist with a huge workload of other clients, I would have realized that it was almost entirely up to me to promote my book.  I would have hired a publicist, and that might have resulted in much more exposure, and perhaps a different trajectory for my career.  I would have done everything I could think of on my own to beat the bushes to bring attention to my book. 

I decided that, though it was too late to change that, there was nothing stopping me from doing for Aloha what I should have done back then. As a result, I hired a publicist who is doing a good job getting me media attention, speaking engagements, and other promotional opportunities.  On my own, I have been reaching out to every library and independent bookstore on Vancouver Island, and contacting every organization I can think of who has events involving speakers. I’ve been going around to bookstores talking with owners and managers. I initiated a fundraiser where I will speak and donate the proceeds. What this means is that on any given day I will have my own plans for my time, but almost always have to fit in something that the publicist wants, or someone will get in touch with me about an event or other opportunity based on my own outreach.  

And that brings me to mid-April, when I had another cruise assignment from Tokyo to Seattle.  By the time I got home it was May, pub month, where my big activity was to plan and carry out a really fun launch party. There’s a photo below of me with Christian Fink-Jensen, Aloha’s wonderful biographer, and another of my friends gathered around to support me.

In early June I went on a promotional trip to San Diego. I just got back a few days ago, and am in the thick of promotion again. 

But back to the cruising part of my life.  I am off on a long assignment, from the end of August to the beginning of November, and there’s all that prep to do before I get on board and now only about two months to do it.  Add that to my general busy-ness and I think you can see why it’s so easy to forget I have a website.  Still, I have so much to tell you, that I don’t think I will forget it for long!