The Second Adventure – This Blog

s Greetings! 

I’m the Old Goat — a fifty-year-old woman with the soul of a vagabond and the tenacity of a mountain goat. When I was younger, I criscrossed the United States alone (once by car, three times by train in different directions), summered on a kibbutz, wrote half a novel, lived in a commune, and built a political movement out of nothing but an idea, a bolt of fabric, a pack of safety pins, and the willingness to stand on a table and look stupid. For the last fifteen years or so, my primary adventure of choice has been raising children, which has kept me relatively sedentary — a condition compounded by a chronic pain and fatigue condition I didn’t get correctly diagnosed until my late thirties. Also, my mother tended to get freaked out when I did wild things after the kids were born.

By now, the kids are old enough to leave behind on some adventures and bring with me on others. My mom has recently passed on, and I hit my fiftieth birthday with a resounding SMACK in January of 2020. Enough is enough of this sedentary lifestyle!! I decided it was more than time to rediscover my sense of wonder, and hit the ground running on my fifties by booking two international trips (you’ll read about those shortly), signing up for a French course and a photography course, and dying my hair a color not found in nature. You can see a bit of the teal curls beside the eye on my icon photo. The sign of the half-closed eye, incidentally, is one I stole from an author named Barry Hughart, in a book called Bridge of Birds. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It’s been my favorite book in the world for thirty-five years. 

Turning my hair teal was the First Adventure, and I completed it about two weeks ago. I’ve been very happy with it so far. It will probably keep turning different strange colors from time to time… I’ll post pictures whenever it changes! It is entirely consistent with my arbitrary and capricious nature to begin with the Second Adventure, having already passed the first one. Nothing ever really starts or ends, so let’s begin by jumping right into the middle and have a good time, shall we? I’m convinced that you can teach a old goat new tricks… and there’s no time like today.