Have you noticed that “I didn’t”…
… always trumps, “I shoulda, I coulda, I woulda?”
— Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
Artists Color Taos’ Past
By Igor Lobanov and Silvia Shepard-Lobanov
Mature Life Features
TAOS, N. M. — Our earliest remembrance of this small town in northern New Mexico is of a quiet, dusty village that was a lodestone for painters, writers, and other free spirits. The year was 1940 and our family was spending the summer at a modest inn just off the main plaza. The clear air and bright sun at 7,000-feet on this high-desert plateau at the base of the Sangre de Christo Mountains produces an extraordinary quality of light.
Except when a rain squall sweeps in. One such remains in sharp memory. We had driven some 20 miles north of town on a dirt road that wound up a forested mountain slope to a five-room cabin 8,500 feet up. We were to have tea with Frieda Lawrence, widow of the controversial English novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence. The couple had lived on this peaceful forested slope for the portions of several years until shortly before his death from tuberculosis a decade earlier in France.
The ranch was the author’s respite for a troubled soul. He enjoyed cutting wood, hammering repairs to the building, baking bread, and galloping his horse through the woods. He even looked forward to milking his recalcitrant black-eyed cow, Susan, that would run away if he showed up wearing pants it did not like. Each morning, he could be found sitting under a tree, pen in hand, doing his writing.
“Lorenzo,” as Frieda called him, could be moody, joyful, loving or hateful — all in the same short period of time. Though he had traveled and lived over much of the world, his time here with the coterie of world-renowned people his presence drew — from Lillian Gish to Leopold Stokowski and Alduous Huxley to Margaret Sanger and many more — brought an ongoing artistic and intellectual richness to the community.
When we headed back to town, rain pelted the rutted track and our slipping and sliding car barely made it to the valley floor. On a return trip here in the winter of 1952, nighttime temperatures dropped below zero (Fahrenheit) making for chilly strolls through unheated galleries in the homes of some of its better known artists. To warm up there was the cozy bar in the Taos Inn where young novelist and former Korean War veteran Walter J. Sheldon played his guitar at one time to unwind from daily writing stints.
Taos has managed to weave its centuries-old Spanish and Native American cultures with a nationally recognized art colony. Painters Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips arrived here from Paris in 1898 and founded the Taos Society of Artists that celebrates the community’s standing in the art world with annual festivals. This has created an expensive elements that include a sprinkling of upscale shops, well-lit galleries, fine restaurants, and ski resort said to equal Colorado’s Vail and Aspen.
One local official offered that Taos has “two industries – tourism and poverty.” The waiter who served you dinner last night may have created the art you purchased today.
South of town, you’ll find the 18th century adobe-walled San Francisco de Asis church celebrated in a series of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. Three miles north of the central plaza is the 1,000-year-old Taos Pueblo (see photo), a World Heritage Site with small art colony of its own.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2003
Find Someone to Trust for Your Trust
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
Finding one or more trustees for your trust presents both emotional and economic problems.
Do you want someone in the family to handle all the responsibilities and conditions outlined in the trust that you, and your spouse and your attorney agonized over? Or do you feel more comfortable putting all this work in the hands of an impersonal professional?
Trusts are merely tools to help you with taxes and planning for the distribution of your estate. The costs and fees for preparing and managing a trust vary widely. So shop around.
You’ll need to talk to an attorney. He or she will probably prepare the trust with you. And you can name the attorney a trustee if you and he/she agree. More than likely you will name one or two friends or family members as the main trustees. Some financial experts suggest you name an “outsider” as a backup trustee. This can be your attorney, a brokerage firm, your financial consultant, a mutual fund, or your bank.
There should be provisions in your trust to replace a trustee whot may become too expensive or doesn’t perform his or her job according to the terms of the document. There also should be provisions allowing you or the beneficiaries of the trust to move to another state.
The trustee(s) you name can hire their own experts to help manage the trust. These duties include the responsibility of distributing the assets to beneficiaries, investing assets according to instructions in the trust, filing tax returns, and any other paper work.
Most institutions set the minimum trust size they will handle. Before you begin shopping around for an institutional trustee, discuss the matter with your attorney, accountant, people you know who have appointed such trustees, and with the individuals you have named or plan to name as trustees of your assets.
Mature Life Features. Copyright 2003
The problem with Leap Years is …
… we have to put up with presidential electioneering posturing, pounding and propaganda and campaign crap for an extra day longer than usual.
— Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
Wealth may be measured …
… by bonds and bank accounts. However, given the choice, which would you choose for the New Year: rich and sick. or healthy and unwealthy.
— Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
The HiDef picture on my new TV is great but…
… they’re showing the same old sh .. crap.
— Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
The Day Santa Died
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
‘Twas the day before Christmas.
We got to the butcher and picked up our gallantine for Christmas Eve and lasagna for Christmas dinner. Gallantine is a tradition here. A chicken is de-boned and stuffed with everything from prosciutto to pistachios and hard-boiled eggs to eggplant, then pressed and cooked, sliced and eaten cold. Got chores done while we were out – cash from the bank ATM, started the car, and checked out our last-minute grocery list — as a humid sirocco-like wind swooped in and made the town almost summery. Lou dropped by for a grappa and headed home for a shower. Riccardo dropped by about midday and said he’d skip tonight because he won’t be able to find a parking space because of midnight Mass at the church.
Then he told us. “Bobbie died,” he said
Bobbie was ambushed by a deadly heart attack on his early-morning walk with his dog. He had been looking forward to playing Santa: “A true Santa Claus from the North,” he told me several days earlier. He was proud of the fact that he was the first non-native offered the role. He even let his beard grow to match his thick head of white hair. He had been a technical-magazine editor in Sweden before chucking it and moving to Panicale, where he augmented whatever pension and other funds he had by managing rental properties, organizing travel tours, and dabbling in real estate.
I skidded down to the piazza to scout out the facts. Lou was right behind me. We ran into Simone’s wife (Aldo’s daughter-in-law who owns and works with her husband at the osteria they opened in the apartment Bev and I rented on our first trip). Lou got our foto and she told us “Babbo Natale e morta.” I asked if they found an alternate. She nodded her head: “Qualqu’ uno” (somebody).
I asked if her osteria’s Christmas Eve dinner (30 euros per person) was full. She shook her head “no,” and explained they didn’t start planning/advertising early enough. I said they’ll start earlier next year. She nodded “si.”
Then she added that Santa was due to land in the piazza at 3:30 p.m. We returned to the apartment and sipped a few until it was time to check the piazza. It was still warm and humid but it started to drizzle on the couple of dozen kids and their parents scattered around the 550-year-old fountain. So they trooped into below-street-level club room across the alley from the osteria. Guillermo said the club room was made available after it started to rain. Santa and his jingling bells were greeted about 4:20 by applauding parents and wide-eyed youngsters. Everyone got something. Even the adults — each received a little package of candy that was handed out by the children.
But no one seemed to miss Bobbie.
(A few days later, a hearse squeezed up through the steep archway and a clutch of mourners followed the casket into the church for Mass. When the service ended and the remains rolled back into the vehicle, no one followed but everyone applauded Bobbie’s passing as the long car slipped down into the piazza and out the Umberto 1 gate.)
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2011
Rome Gets Ready
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
A Christmas carnival in Piazza Navona is just that – a carnival, complete with carousel, carney games (“A Win Every Time”), knick-knack booths, balloons dancing with the wind, hot and cold food, classes of kids corralled by clusters of nuns, litters of tourists marshaled around by guys and gals waving them on with numbered signs, and dueling guitarists. All this counterpointing the ageless statues and churches that give substance to this celebrated canyon a couple of blocks from the Pantheon in The Eternal City.
I quickly snagged a cimballi calde (hot doughnut) to hold me until lunch. A cimballi is a Roman doughnut about the size of a small pizza and can be eaten plain, sprinkled with sugar or covered with Nutella (a chocolate-hazelnut butter spread popular here). I hadn’t had one since one of the officers aboard our freighter cooked a batch one morning. The dough is much tastier than the U.S. donut, it’s deep-fried but as flat as a pizza, has a less fatty texture and doesn’t curl up into gut-busting balls to play havoc with your digestive processes and system.
We went to Rome after the high season opened Dec. 8. It closes Jan. 6. Both days are national holidays here. The first is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception; the closing date is Epiphany, also known as Little Christmas in many quarters.
For our first stop, we arrived at my favorite optometric shop on Via Nazionale just as the owner was unlocking his exterior display boxes and I bought a couple of pairs of sunglasses. They’re about one-fifth the price of expensive ones sold under such American trade names as RayBan,Foster Grant, etc., which are made by these same Italians. Bev got an eyeglass frame to take home.
After strolling into and by the ritzy boutiques stretching from the Spanish steps to the Trevi Fountain — and picking up a gelato across from the fountain at one of the finest gelateria in the universe – we went into the Pantheon for the first time. It’s now a basilica with Mass offered every Saturday and Sunday, although it’s closed Christmas Day. The sun was bouncing off Roman roofs so we didn’t have to worry about rain falling in through the hole in the massive copula that also lets light pour into the building, the only one to survive two millennia in its entirety since Roman times.
After lunch at my favorite eating spot – Melo’s, a Sicilian ristorante on the steps leading down from the bottom of Via Nazionale to il Vittoriano and the Forum – we decided to take an earlier train back home instead of hanging around into the evening. We were tired.
The sun was rising as our train pulled out of Chiusi and it was setting as we rolled out of Roma Termini.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2010
Follow Noble Nobel Footsteps
By Marlene Fanta Shyer
Mature Life Features
STOCKHOLM —- You walk up the same marble stairs that Nobel Prize winners have climbed every Dec 10, the anniversary of the death of the prize’s namesake, since 1901. You’re in the City Hall in Stockholm and gazing up at the granite pillars and exposed brick walls that stretch 75 feet from floor to ceiling in the Blue Hall.
There’s not a spot of blue anywhere. It was designed by Ragnar Östberg, a Swedish architect inspired by Italian design who envisioned a soaring ceiling-free space with a view of an azure sky. However, the climate demanded a roof be added, but it’s been stuck with the misnomer for more than a century.
Each year some 1,300 carefully chosen citizens from around the world will witness the five-allotted-minutes of winners’ speeches and the bestowing of the big checks. They will dine on menus prepared by dozens of the best chefs in Sweden, and be served by hundreds of waiters dressed in black and white. Then they proceed to the aptly named Golden Room, with its leaded windows and walls of Byzantine gold mosaic tile. This is where, under crystal chandeliers, they will dance away the night.
As you stand on the spot where the most coveted award in the world is celebrated annually, Stockholm comes very much alive, but it’s just part of reason to visit the city. Built on 14 islands and called everything from “image-conscious” to “trend- hungry” to “tech-friendly,” it is richly historical as well, with its Old Town of narrow cobblestone streets and clutter of shops, Royal Palace, and National Museum.
A Viking ship that sank in the Baltic about three miles from the city in 1628 was discovered some 40 years ago. It was pulled out of the deep complete with 27 bodies, casks of spirits, the bones of meat intended to feed the passengers, and personal items, such as toys. After being salvaged and restored, it has become a whopper of an attraction, drawing 800,000 visitors to the museum every year.
Other landmarks can be found at the Storkyrkan, the cathedral famous for its statue of the city’s patron saint, George, or at one of Stockholm’s many parks. These are everywhere, the most popular being Djurgarden, the vast former royal hunting ground, now quiet and scenic. Skansen, an amusement park/zoo well known for its exhibit of Sweden’s 19th-century rural roots, complete with old farmhouses, reindeer, and craftsmen’s shops, offers a livelier experience.
Wherever you head in Stockholm, water views are always close by, as are some of the finest restaurants in Europe. The Operakälleren, for example, offers a choice of casual dining at reasonable prices in one room or, as one diner put it, going into “a food coma” in the lush ambience of red brocade and Victorian oil portraits in adjoining quarters. Folks feast here on such dishes as “Baked Bass with vanilla flavoured sauce and vegetable ragout wrapped in chard” or “saddle of rabbit with olive sauce and a zucchini flowers stuffed with anchovies.”
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2003
Mature Life Features 
