Traveling Bonds
Karl Giberson
Writer’s Log: Stardate 11/12-2-12
I will soon be in the Pacific Northwest for the last leg of my trip. I just said goodbye to an old friend, Sam Jean, who was a student of mine many years ago at ENC and then lived with my family for some of the time he was going to Boston University Law school. He now works as a scriptwriter and consultant in Hollywood and lives in a bachelor pad in downtown LA. We caught up over dinner and then watched “Driver” and “Colombiana,” two more or less mindless action movies of the sort we watched all the time when he lived at my house.
(Sam and I share the deepest possible male bond—together we opened all 100 of the worlds in “Super Mario,” shortly after the Super Nintendo system came out years ago.)
I have been thinking about the extended network of friends and colleagues that trips like this make it possible to re-engage. This past Monday at Point Loma Nazarene University I visited, for the third time, their Monday “science and religion” book club. That perennial group has read several of my books over the years and I have had the privilege of talking to them about my writing. I also talked to another of Dean Nelson’s writing classes. Dean and I have become such good friends over the past few years, drawn together by our mutual interest in writing.
At Azusa Pacific I reconnected with Leslie Wickman who does really interesting work on global warming and its affects on shipping lanes at the North Pole. Although Rush Limbaugh assures us that global warming is a hoax, the process is nevertheless opening up new waterways as glaciers shrink dramatically. I was also lucky to stay with Anita and Bill Henck and share various horror stories about which I will say nothing here.
On Friday morning I drove to Westmont College along the breathtaking Highway 101 that runs alongside the ocean in several places. I spoke to a packed house, which is always encouraging, and then had a wonderful evening with three science faculty at a local Mexican place. My old friend Jeff Schloss and I had breakfast in a Starbucks on Saturday and caught up on various projects of mutual interest. William Baldwin, of “Backdraft” fame, was also getting coffee there so we had to hide so he wouldn’t come bother us.