Happy Trails, Colorado!

Many times, I fear that in traveling and moving from place to place, job to job, I will fail to give due credit to the cities and people that I meet. After all, as a temporary resident, my sense of any town is necessarily partial. And as a writer, I may be tempted to toss out some hasty judgments, if only to get something down on the page. [Sorry, Mexico City. My apologies, Pizza Hut.] 

I also fear that what may be for me the perfect cut to yet another scene in the story of my life--a year teaching English in Mexico, say, or a year mentoring 3rd graders in Denver--might appear as a slap in the face to my dearest and best-est newly-made friends. Surely, they must be thinking: What a prick! Up and moves to New York! Graduate school at Columbia? WELL GOOD. FOR. HIM!  

Not true though! I have been wowed beyond my imagination these past two years by all the beauties of Mexico and Colorado and by all the wonderful people that live there. Although I must admit: while personally fulfilled in every sense, in Mexico I squeezed many oranges but not all, and in Colorado I ran many trails but really only some.

Happy trails, then, to you my "Colorful Colorado." I will cherish many things about your wonderful state, especially this time next year as I am choking on $12 martinis among the most dour black-clad twenty-somethings that New York has to offer...

• 300+ days of sunshine and the bluest of skies. 
• 17 open-space parks just 20 minutes away. 
• A geological feature that is not endless fields of corn or megatons of concrete.
• People who love to drink beer. 
• A casual dress code almost everywhere you go.
• Hearty dogs on city streets.
• Living in proximity to family. 
• Living with my lover.
• Friends with big, red beards.
• An unspoken agreement by all able-bodied males to grow a winter beard. 
• Baseball games sans the annoying advertisements and announcers.
• People whose idea of a night out is a midnight hike under a full moon.
• Rivers and streams that you can actually see through.
• People who wash windows, lay tile, and fix cars...and are actually happy. 
• Fat-tire bicycles. 
• BBQ sandwiches. 
• And much, much more. Obviously. 

It all began as a plaintive song, sung on a bed, somewhere in the middle of Mexico about a year ago. John Denver's "Guess He'd Rather Be in Colorado." What a treat and yet what sadness it also is to finally know what that means.