My mom grew up in a two-family home at 554 Montgomery Street in Brooklyn, New York. My mom's family lived on the lower floor  while her Aunt Ida (her mom's sister) lived on the upper floor with her husband and children. Mom's parents had some challenging health issues that took them away from the home for extended periods of time. In many respects, her Aunt Ida raised my mom, bringing her quite close to Ida's children, Hy and Barbara.

Cousin Hy, as he's always been known to me, parlayed an early interest in ham radio into a successful career as an electrical engineer, patent attorney and inventor. For the last 24 years, he's worked for IBM and has 15 patents to his name.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, three reasons:
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• Cousin Hy is coming to Maine for the wedding
• He is the smartest person I know
• He is a kind and gentle soul

We need more Cousin Hy's in the world.

I finished the book Abbey's Road by Edward Abbey. The book is a collection of stories that he wrote chronicling his travels to various remote and desolate places, including:
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• The Australian Outback
• Isla de la Sombra
• Sierra Madre
• Various national parks

Abbey was quite a character, to say the least. He adored those remote and desolate places and wrote, in often scathing fashion, about the potential loss of these habitats to development. In his fictional works, it is said that he was one of the first people to promote eco-terrorism.

All of that aside, here are some memorable quotes of his from the book:

The geologists, the earth scientists, have given us a beautiful and elaborate picture of the planet's formation and development; they have constructed a time scheme with which they can diagram, as with an overlay, each evolutionary step in the long process. But all that, I maintain, is merely information. It is not knowledge; even less is it understanding. Knowledge and understanding, though based on information as an essential component, require more, namely, feeling, intuition, physical contact -- touching, and sympathy, and love.

and

​A few miles up the canyon we go ashore in a cove without a name. Others have been here before, as the human dung and toilet paper, the tinfoil, plastic plates, abandoned underwear, rusty fishhooks, tangled lines, discarded socks, empty Coors cans, and broken glass clearly attest. But on the shores of Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado and National Recreational Slum, you have no choice. All possible campsites look like this one. There is no lower form of life known to zoological science than the motorboat fisherman, the speedboat sightseer.

and

They look like tiny horseshoe crabs -- or like miniature trilobites from the earliest seas of all, come back to haunt us with the memory of the earth's long, strange, splendid, and meaningless history...

Over the desert and the canyons, down there in the rocks, a huge vibration of light and stillness and solitude shapes itself into the form of hovering wings spread out across the sky from the world's rim to the world's end. Not God -- the term seems insufficient -- but something unnameable, and more beautiful, and far greater, and more terrible.

George B. Dorr is widely acknowledged as the Father of Acadia National Park. He oversaw the creation of the park, donated all of his own land purchased with his personal fortune, convinced other wealthy landowners to do the same, and served as the park's superintendent from its inception in 1919 until his death in 1944.

Sadly, the home he lived in his entire adult life fell into disrepair after his death and was razed in 1951. Curiously, John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated $5,000 to pay to have the home demolished, but did not donate the $30,000 it would have taken to perform all of the designated structural repairs. Today, all that remains of the home is its stone foundation, brick patio and granite staircases down to Compass Harbor, along with a disconcertingly small sign (for the father of Acadia, after all) denoting the presence of the ruins.

Have you ever heard of Edward Abbey? I had not. Right now, I find myself in the curious position of reading two of his books simultaneously: Desert Solitaire, which I managed to leave back in Richmond; and Abbey's Road, which I found on a bookshelf in our rental home here in Bar Harbor. 

Abbey was quite a character, to say the least. I'll reserve my own judgment until I've finished these two books. Until then, here is just one jewel of his:

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

What is now known as Mount Desert Island was known to the local Wabanaki Indians as Pemetic, meaning "mountains seen at a distance." The Wabanaki fished, hunted and collected clams, so many in fact that what has become Bar Harbor was originally known as Man-es-ayd'ik, meaning "clam-gathering place."

What is currently known as Acadia National Park was initially called Sieur de Monts National Monument,  by proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. That monument was renamed to Lafayette National Park by Congress in 1919, in honor of Marquis de Lafayette. Finally, the park was given its current name in 1929, an Anglicized word meaning "a colony of New France in northeastern North America."

Over 3.5 million people visited Acadia National Park in 2018, making it in the 7th most-visited national park in 2018.

In an op-ed piece from 2017 titled Legislative Lemons, author Michael Tomasky writes that:

In 27 years, Republicans have passed one popular conservative law and spent most of that time voting against things that clear majorities of Americans wanted. If they weren’t serving Americans, whom were they serving? And how have they gotten away with it?

The answers to both questions, alas, are depressingly familiar. They are serving their megarich donors and the most extreme elements of their base. And they get away with it because of the way they’ve gerrymandered House districts, because of an ideological right-wing media that obfuscates facts and because the one thing they’ve done astonishingly well is to make a big chunk of the country hate liberals.

​Do you consider yourself a Democrat? If so, then you probably already know all of this (sadly, too well). On the other hand, do you consider yourself a Republican? If so, then I implore you: read that piece and then explain to me how you can hold your head high in 2019 and continue to call yourself a Republican, proudly or otherwise.

Thank goodness I've got music to help distract me from the otherwise chaotic news cycle that has dominated our world since He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named was elevated to the presidency of our country. 

One of my very favorites, captured at right, is the Prelude of J. S. Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. In fact, I've just finished a book that focused on Bach's life and his composition of the suites. I'll tell you about it sometime.

The hour is late. Time for sleep.

Last year, my extended family spent two weeks of vacation in Bar Harbor, Maine. My mom, sisters, their husbands and children all joined us for the event. We spent most of our time exploring Bar Harbor itself as well as Acadia National Park, which occupies a majority of Mount Desert Island.

We all enjoyed ourselves sufficiently that we chose to return again this year. Plus, as an added bonus, my sister Susan and her fiancé have chosen to tie the knot right here in Bar Harbor. That will be at the end of next week, at the very end of our stay.

Our drive from Richmond to Maine well smoothly and uneventfully until, well, it didn't. As we left Richmond on a Friday morning, I decided that it would behoove us to avoid Interstate 95 (and, in turn, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City). Instead, we headed up toward Washington and then swung to the north and west, pointing the car at Scranton, Pennsylvania. Once in Scranton, we hopped onto Interstate 84 and it was a straight shot east to  Danbury, Connecticut, our destination for the evening. My plan worked perfectly; we traveled traffic-free the entire way. On Saturday, however, things went south quickly. In my zeal to avoid all metropolitan areas, I had forgotten about Boston. Although we didn't travel through Boston but rather took the 495 Beltway around it, we ran into an ungodly amount of traffic, mixed in with tens of thousands of weekend warriors heading to the beaches of southern Maine. We lost about two hours in that traffic, but once we had put it behind us, we sailed the rest of the way to Bar Harbor without incident.

The Common Good Soup Kitchen is located in Southwest Harbor, on the southern side of Mount Desert Island. Throughout the year, they provide many thousands of meals to the local, indigent community. They are supported financially in large part by their "Popover Sundays," which features live music and the most delicious popovers you've have the chance to sample. Popover Sunday, picture at right, was the highlight of our first day here in Maine.

Eli gets on a plane on July 29th to head to Tucson for his new job at Kitt Peak National Observatory. Since we will be here in Maine when he leaves, we celebrated his sendoff before we left.

On Sunday night, Alison and I dined with Eli and his girlfriend Faith at The Boathouse at Rockett's Landing in Richmond. This is the restaurant our family always uses for special occasions.

On Wednesday night, we hosted his official sendoff dinner party at our home, with all of our local family joining us to wish Eli well.

Although Eli plays his emotions pretty close to his vest, he definitely seemed to enjoy the experience.

Did you ever wonder from where the phrase "tie the knot" derives? Well, I did and so I looked up a definition from the all-knowing and utterly fallible Internet:

The origin of "tying the knot" is either from the Roman times when the bride's girdle was tied in knots on the wedding day and the groom had to untie the knots prior to consummating the marriage or more likely from the Celtic (pagan) marriage ceremony of handfasting, where the hands of the bride and groom were tied together for a marriage "contract" of one year plus one day that the newlyweds promised to stay together prior to the marriage becoming "legal."  If the husband and wife decided at that point they were not for each other they would part.  If not, the marriage was then forever.

With an area of 108 square miles, Mount Desert Island is the second largest island on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, smaller than Long Island in New York (1401 square miles) but larger than Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts (96 square miles).