Appreciating what we have

Okay Faithful Reader, here's the deal.

I know that I said two columns ago that I was going to start writing on topics in a series. I'm still going to do that.

The week after I wrote that first column though, Bard Reed died. He was a friend I greatly admired, and I was compelled to write a tribute to him in this paper because it was his hometown paper and that seemed appropriate.

And today, just to be straight with you, I'm running on about three hours of sleep. I ain't got it in me to write about the next thing I was going to write about, that being moral relativism. It's a heavy topic. But I'm going to do that. Next time. For real.

So. Here's something that I feel up to writing about that is still really good. That is, our fair state of Arkansas.

Growing up here, I didn't appreciate Arkansas like I do now. Maybe that's true for wherever you grow up. I lived my whole life here until I left after high school when I was 18, and I wanted nothing more than to get out and wander the wide world beyond the bounds of what I knew.

And I got to do just that.

I slept on the floor of a bus as it hurtled through the Swiss Alps in the dead of night, and walked bleary-eyed into a German truck stop at dawn the following morning. I lived in New York City for a spell and it was an absolute blast, especially when I lived in Harlem. You are missing a small part of life if you never got to ride the Fung Wah bus from Chinatown to Boston.

I pub crawled in Edinburgh with people from around the world. I climbed a dormant volcano in Hawaii. I got kissed by a pretty gal in the middle of the street in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I saw a dust storm blow in from the Arizona desert. I saw the Sistine Chapel and the Colosseum and the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of London. I stared out over the silent, dark ocean off the Alaskan coast and almost got swallowed in that distance. I attended Mass at the Vatican. I shot Italian rum with a famous metal band backstage. I walked through a stone city centuries older than the pyramids off the northern coast of Scotland.

You get the idea. I got to see something of the world beyond the bounds.

And doing all that has made me appreciate Arkansas more.

Last weekend, a friend came and visited that I hadn't seen in more than a decade. When last we saw each other, we didn't leave Little Rock, so I wanted her to see some of the rest of Arkansas.

She's been a desert dweller out west for most of her life, so I took her up into the Ozarks to see the mountains in the fall. She kept saying how beautiful it was. We stayed at Subiaco Abbey that night and prayed with the monks early the next morning.

We had lunch at Vino's in Little Rock later that day and then went down to Hot Springs, which was Vegas before Vegas was Vegas. Yes, that little town in the southern reaches of the Ouachita Mountains is what inspired the mob to build an oasis of casinos in the middle of the desert. An Arkansan claim to fame to be sure.

We are a somewhat quirky little state of small towns, from the soybean fields in the Delta to the gravel roads that wind through endless pine trees and hardwoods in South Arkansas to the mountain forests in the north, wreathed in mist and cold at sunrise. And we surely have our problems, but on the whole, we're good folk, I think.

My friend was delighted by the whirlwind tour of Arkansas. I have found that most people who come here and have never been here before are pleasantly surprised. Some of them come to stay. I tell people from other parts of the country and other countries that we are a hidden jewel, one of America's best kept secrets. When they come, they usually agree.

"My home is beautiful," I tell people.

That's not something that I would have said when I was 18 and ridden with wanderlust. But having wandered the wide world a bit, now I know a good thing when I see it.

I am still ridden with wanderlust. There is so much that I still long to see and do. The wide world still beckons, and at times I get restless.

But these days, home is good too.

Caleb Baumgardner is a local attorney. He can be reached at [email protected].

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