August 3, 2026 - I need to see a man ON a horse, not ABOUT a horse -

I struggled with the local accent in Durham. I asked about a salad, and they said it was just little jamolattas. I asked what a jamolatta might be. No, no, LITTLE jamolattas! Turned out to be boring enough: only Little Gem Lettuce.

Also, the second time I locked myself out of my room, I told the cheery receptionist (Oh, HELLO, again!) that I needed another key, but first, I needed a bathroom. Did they have one in the lobby?

She said, “Down the hall, but I’ll have to get a cord, because the toilet is unstable.”

I knew this was wrong. I should have let it go. But I had questions. “You need to get a cord because the toilet is unstable?”

She tried to explain, but no joy. I was so sorry I had brought it up. We were wasting entire seconds. I smiled in faux-understanding.

She disappeared into a back room, then reappeared -- cordless -- and began leading me down the hall. I forced myself to hold all questions, along with everything else. We reached an unmarked door. She punched in a key code.

A CODE! She had to get a CODE! Half of my questions were answered. I let the rest remain a mystery.

2) Our choir tour group included many companions. This year, among those who didn’t sing, we had choir members’ mothers, grandmothers, a dad, a brother, spouses, children, and people from the church who just wanted to travel with a group instead of alone. It was lovely to have them.

One morning, a companion asked the tour organizer when the excursion buses were leaving. It appeared she had asked before. The organizer, mildly exasperated, said, “That was in the email!”

The companion said blithely, “Oh, I never read those things! I can’t delete them fast enough. They just pile up!”  I intend to model myself on her in the future.

3) Towards the end of the trip, trying not to do the usual “what was your favorite moment,” I asked the organizer what his low point had been. He said it was when the group got to the train station and he discovered that while we had purchased 57 tickets, all of them were for the same seat. (My daughter, who lives in the UK, says this cannot be done. And yet ….)

Continuing my creative-question streak, I asked a young choir members if being on tour had led her to like anyone in the choir more now than she had liked them before we left. She pondered and said, “Well … you?”

4) Durham is not very big, but it has a twisty, up-and-down, many-bridge geography, with steep hills on either side of an ever-looping river. It’s easy to get turned around, so I navigated by landmarks. One such was a huge statue, a man on a horse wearing a hat with a very high cockade.

Much like the aforementioned companion who doesn't read emails, I didn’t bother learning the name of the square where the statue was. I didn't learn the name of the man on the horse, nor the name of the horse. That would only have wasted time, and caused confusion.

Instead, as a courtesy, when I needed to know where to find a post office, I simply used the internationally recognized symbol for that particular statue. I would assume the position and ask, “Where is the post office compared to…?”

Oddly, many people did not recognize that international symbol. They needed it explained. One person said, "There’s a statue of a man on a horse with a tall thing on his hat HERE?” 

Other people need to work on this

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