How often does the average person tend to provide specific details regarding events that occurred more than a dozen years ago? This excavation of my own past has been my main task for the past few weeks as I reworked 30 old blog posts pertaining to travels taken from May 15, 2009, through October 17 of the same year.

I surely have explained elsewhere on my blog (or on the very indexes I’ve been creating to come up with a comprehensive list of all of our travels) that I’m repairing posts that were thin on photos and details when they were originally created. You see, back in the old days, bandwidth was at a premium, and nobody had time to wait for even five photos to download, so my posts reflected those limits. Consequently, with 1 to 3 photos per travel day, I would have compressed the events of the day into the 3 to 5 paragraphs that accompanied the images.

So, after our last adventure that saw us up in Williams, Arizona, for a weekend of hiking at the end of July and the fast-approaching date of Caroline’s bunionectomy, I turned my attention not just to caring for my invalid wife but also to my travel index. This index presents a bit of a challenge, though, because to select a single photo to represent a specific day, I need to be certain that I have the best one. All too often, my heart sinks when I review an old post and see its sole image or maybe the 2 or 3 that are there. Sure enough, I checked the photo directory of that date, and when I saw that I shot anywhere from 75 up to 1,000 photos, I groaned under the weight that there was a lot of visual information I had neglected.

I end up readjusting the old photos that accompanied the original posting and then get busy adding a bunch more. Regarding the 30 posts I worked on in the past few weeks, I ended up adding more than 600 photos from the archive, so we now have a better visual representation of the events of those days. But I can’t just add a bunch of photos without some explanation/narrative that accompanies each new image. In some instances, there was enough information in the compressed paragraphs detailing the majority of the day that I could pull inspiration from, while in some situations, such as our visit to Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, I had a lot of writing that had to be cared for.

That’s what I’ve been working on, and like my previous attempts to make progress on this massive undertaking, I have to take a break from the tedium. There’s a risk I fall into compulsive frantic attention to this task that is taking far longer than I ever imagined. At this point in the index, I’m on day 677, which is a measure of each day that we traveled away from Phoenix, Arizona, since August 9, 1999, and the commercial advent of digital photography when we were able to easily start cataloging our travels. By the way, this index does not include day trips.

Now, with about a couple of weeks before our next outing, I can turn my focus to other compulsive activities, such as some deeper reading and turning to my synth for some much-needed exploration.

All of the above photos were taken between May 15 and October 17, 2009. Over in the right column under “Other Pages,” you’ll find the links to the evolving index of “Our Travels.”

Their lives are changing, but they don’t know it yet. People count on consistency, repetition, and some certainty. And so it is when they’ve found a place that has allowed them to find some sense of community. The coffee shop I’m writing at today is closing in 23 days, but it’s not been announced yet, so some of the regulars are still in their routine with no sense of foreboding or knowledge that a month from now, many of them will no longer run into each other. I believe when they, too, learn of the closing, there will be a sense of mourning as a favorite morning stop is being taken off the map.

Inflation is the culprit, taking another victim that will be yet one more anonymous mom & pop operation to close on the march toward corporatized America. The division of wealth has created incredible hostilities between reality, comfort, and what some of us consider luxury. When private equity groups, millionaires, and billionaires are able to gobble up vast amounts of property and require them to have sizable returns to generate yet more wealth, they can take rents and valuations to whatever the market might bear. As for the disenfranchised public at large, they are a faceless victim that will either figure it out or land on the street; such is our take-no-prisoners style of business.

Regarding this coffee shop, the rent is going up, coffee prices are rising in part due to energy and transportation costs, finding basic supplies such as cups, lids, and even oatmeal grows more challenging, and all of this figures into the problems of finding employees that even if they were available, the employer has to remain aware that they are going to be pinched by an economy that will have them needing to demand more money.

Meanwhile, the laughter this place is accustomed to continues throughout the morning, and I’m acutely aware that this counter I’ve stood at for years will become a distant memory like so many other places I’ve frequented over the decades. Normally, I move away or encounter the locked door of a business that, from one day to the next, just quit. I’m sure that they, too, knew what was coming but couldn’t face the brutality of telling customers whose sympathies would make it just that much more heartbreaking to see their dream extinguished. Part of me wishes today that I didn’t know.

Until the owner makes the announcement, there will be no commiseration parties of solemnity over final cups of coffee; it’s business as usual…until it’s not.