Featured Articles
Heart-Shaped Map
by Pam Mandel
Liv Fun: Vol 7 – Issue 3
We joke that we met on a reality TV show, but the truth is just as unlikely. He showed up at sunset at Ayers Rock, and I recognized him right away as the person who’d come for my heart. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does, he says it was the same for him. Neither of us is from Australia, but there we were in the golden hour light at that place and time, open to whatever was going to happen. That was more than 20 years ago. We’re still married, and now we share a house and a dog and a life in Seattle.
What is it about traveling that cracks open the hard shell of our hearts and makes it easy to fall in love? And this falling, it’s more than your cartoony summer romance — and it’s not just with people; it’s with place too. The relentlessly informal fall in love with Viennese cafes and their tuxedoed waiters. The most committed of night owls will rise at dawn to hear the call to prayer be swept across the rooftops and up into the rising light of a Cairo dawn. A Type A overachiever steps out into the chaos of Hanoi and finds joy in noise of scooters piled high with merchandise, shop fronts uncontained, spilling their merchandise out into the sidewalks, the mess such that they have to step off the high curbs into the street, laughing about a situation that would enrage them back home.
Poetic travel writer Pico Lyer wrote: “All the best journeys, I have always felt, are like love affairs, not least because they turn you inside out and leave you within a darkness where you can’t tell right from left or good from bad. And all love affairs are like journeys, deep into a foreign country, where you can’t read the signs, and you don’t know the language and you are drawn into a wilderness alive with mystery and possibility, and the knowledge — certain knowledge — that who you were is irretrievable.”
Liv Fun
by Leisure Care
Autumn 2018
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Our Hearts
by Tammy Kennon
We’ve entered a new frontier — we are the first generation to have a life expectancy of 65–79+ years. Technological and medical advances are largely responsible for this “Third Age,” and fortunately scientists have come along with us, continually finding actionable ways to extend our good health — and our good humor — in these newfound decades.
Heart-Shaped Map
by Pam MandelWe joke that we met on a reality TV show, but the truth is just as unlikely. He showed up at sunset at Ayers Rock, and I recognized him right away as the person who’d come for my heart. Neither of us is from Australia, but there we were in the golden hour light at that place and time, open to whatever was going to happen.
The Light Shines Through
by Jeff Thaxton
I had the pleasure of meeting Ted Siekerman in August 2015 when he first moved to Fairwinds – Spokane. He seems to carry his positive outlook with him wherever he goes. Perhaps part of the reason is how grateful he is for life. While serving our country during the Korean War, he passed out after sustaining mortar shrapnel throughout his body.