The view from my desk at 6 a.m.

As for resolutions, one might be to tend this outpost on the net more regularly. But I’ll just mention that as a possibility. Higher up the list of intentions is eating well, which I define as eating a fruit or a vegetable every day except Sunday, when I shall consume only Ritz Crackers and Cheez Whiz. I will resume my daily huff-and-puff workouts on the cross trainer, enhanced this year by content on my Kindle Fire. Currently playing are The Wire, Arrested Development, and a black-and-white 1960 classic film, “Never on Sunday” starring Melina Mercouri.

It’s good to be back in downtown Denver, but part of me is always in 02138, staying abreast of the family doings medical and otherwise. It’s all accessible two time zones away via phone, Skype, e-mail, and prayer. But where you are matters, and far away makes a difference. Some part of me gets renewed out here in the West. I like to imagine standing by the banks of the Charles River and looking up a mile to see a high rise condo in the sky. That’s where I am now, way up here where the air is thin and dry, closer to the sun. Something inside me awakens and knows it is home.

But after a paltry ZQ score of 45 I’m not fit to dive deeply into philosophical probings of The West. I’ll be napping before noon to recharge and reboot. And I’ll be winding this up now in order to fulfill today’s dose of another resolution, to press ahead five days a week on research for my book project. Thus, to Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy to make more notes in Evernote. The stakes will be higher this week, because I will talk with the media savant’s son, Dr. Eric McLuhan, on Wednesday for this week’s Kindle Chronicles interview. I want to know what he thinks of the e-book revolution and if he can intuit with a son’s empathy what his famous father might have seen in the modest gray screen of the Kindle.

Claire is sick. She threw up and had diarrhea last night, turning our bedroom into a poop-a-rama of bad smells. Darlene did the heavy lifting in cleaning up the mess. My only contribution was to tie up the trash bag tightly, put on some shorts, a T-shirt, and clogs, and take the bag to the trash chute at 2 a.m.

We rented the OccasionalCar at 9:15 am — oops, didn’t mean to post this yet. WordPress for iPad is still a clumsy version of the real thing.

Anyway, the vet at Petsmart said Claire has something wrong with her intestines, and he prescribed water with electrolytes and rice, plus rest. She had another attack at the store, which meant Darlene smelled real bad by the time we took the rental car back. I put the windows down, even though it was cold, so the next renter would not be offended.

I’ve learned that BlogPress for iPad is better than the last time I tried it six months ago or so, but it’s still like carving a bog BLOG post on a clay tablet compared with a laptop. Claire agrees. I hope she has a quiet night tonight. Our new 2012 Ford Focus may arrive tomorrow, and I’d hate to have that new-car smell compete right off the bat with today’s aroma.

Tish and Darlene on their way to return the handy OccasionalCar rental.

Downtown Denver, it turns out, is a pretty good place to live without a car.

We are learning the truth of this while we wait for our 2012 Ford Focus to arrive, probably in about three weeks.  Dimples, our beloved hail-battered blue Volvo S60, has taken up residence in Cambridge, Mass.  So ever since returning to Denver from Cambridge in January, we have looked to alternate transportation.  Our Wyoming friends Tom and Tish helped out by leaving their Volvo here during their extended visit to New Zealand and Australia. But since their return several weeks ago, this has gotten serious.

We are very fortunate to live in Denver’s Lower Downtown, known locally as LoDo, near the the Free MallRide that runs up and down the I.M. Pei-designed 16th Street pedestrian mall every minute or so during business hours, less frequently on weekends and nights.  This vital connector makes it

Free Mall Shuttle - photo by Paul Swansen

easy to walk out of our building and reach City Hall or the State Capitol, for example, within 10 minutes.  Denver’s amazing Performing Arts Complex, the second-largest performing arts center in the world after New York’s Lincoln Center, is an eight-minute walk from here, so to reach our seat at a show we don’t even need to hop the free shuttle, unless it happens to pull up as we’re walking and maybe it’s raining.

We can also walk 15 minutes in the other direction, past Union Station, through Commons Park, over the historic Platte River to a funky collection of shops and eateries on Platte Street.  Our favorite is The House of Commons, a fantastic English tea room on Platte just north of 15th Street.

All of which is to say that even when Dimples was with us, Darlene and I didn’t drive much here in Denver. We always take the RTD SkyRide to Denver International Airport and back, since it’s so easy to wheel our bags to the Market Street Station for the hourly departures. And I love the ride of 50 minutes to and from the airport, for listening to podcasts or dozing.  Before or after zipping across a couple of time zones to Boston, I always find the bus ride to be a pleasant, grounding interlude.

I could tell Darlene was nervous about our time without a car.  While we were still using Tom and Tish’s Volvo, she made repeated trips to Whole Foods and King Sooper, stocking up on supplies like she was getting ready for a blizzard.  So I have three big jars of chai tea to last me a month, not to mention enough toilet paper and paper towels to equip a battalion. She wasn’t sure she was going to ever get comfortable with the most crucial tool in our carless sojourn – a locally based hourly rental business named OccasionalCar.

It’s a fantastic system that I’ve been playing with both here and in Cambridge, where the best-known model is ZipCar. When you know you’ll need a car, you go to the OccasionalCar web site, enter your membership number and password, and then enter the date and hours you need the car.  We have several OC cars within a few minutes’ walk.  You click “reserve” and that’s it.  What I love most is when the time comes to drive the car away, you hold a gray fob next to a sensor attached to the windshield and wait to hear the click of the doors unlocking.  Inside, the key to start the car is attached to a retractable chain, so there’s no risk of walking off with it.  OccasionalCar is using the Toyota Yaris, a sensible compact similar in size to the Ford Focus.  When the gasoline level falls to a quarter tank, you’re supposed to fill it up using a credit card in the glove compartment.  The first time I did this I got  everything wrong – I entered the trip mileage instead of the odometer reading at the pump, and I couldn’t remember if I had listed our home phone number or my mobile number in the OC registration.  You need to know that, because your PIN is the last six digits of the registered phone number.

Darlene has now used OccasionalCar a couple of times, and she loves it. She has found the call center support staff to be very friendly and helpful for extending the time of a rental and generally passing along useful information, including the fact you can rent one of the cars for a whole day for $40.  That was handy yesterday, when her quilting marathon with Tish and Karen went well into the night.  I was not thrilled about them returning the car to a questionable area of Colfax Avenue past 10 p.m., so instead she simply kept the car in our parking space overnight and returned it this morning.

Photo by e pants

So we’ve got a walkable downtown, a great bus system, and convenient hourly car rentals. But wait — there’s more! Denver last April launched what then was the largest bike-sharing program in the nation, with 500 bikes located at 50 kiosks.  In September, Washington D.C. took the lead, with a system of 1,000 bikes at 100 kiosks. The Mile-High version is named Denver B-Cycle, and the bikes will return to their racks soon after a brief winter hiatus.  To support the program and for added convenience, I signed up for the annual membership for $65.  You can also sign up for passes that offer use for 24 hours, seven days, or 30 days.  Google Maps now offers a bike feature, in addition to walking, driving, and public transportation.  So I can see how a certain route will take full advantage of the Cherry Creek Bike Path, minimizing my time on the streets.

Depending on how going carless in Denver works out during the next few weeks, we may extend the experiment indefinitely. I’m excited about the 2012 Focus, because of its latest-generation Microsoft Sync technology, called MyFordTouch. It’s a gadget on wheels, which appeals to me. But I couldn’t get MyFordTouch on a hybrid vehicle, and with gasoline headed for $4 a gallon, maybe, hybrids are going to be the way to drive in cities.  Think of the savings and the smaller carbon footprint!  But when you compare going carless to a hybrid, it gets even better.  I’ll be interested to compare our current transportation costs with the costs of owning a car, but even with a fair amount of use of OccasionalCar, I bet we’re spending less a month than we did on Dimples, what with car insurance, taxes, and maintenance costs.

Still, the convenience of having your own personal car, available without going onto a website, with no planning required – that’s a lot to give up. The Focus, when it arrives, may lure us to remaining carless in Denver till 2012, because I’m going to be tempted to drive it to Cambridge in May or June when we migrate East for the rest of the year. I’m not sure what would become of Dimples under than scenario, because it’s certainly crazy to have two cars in Cambridge.

As for the soon-to-arrive gadget on wheels, the 2012 Kona Blue Ford Focus, I plan to chronicle my adventures with it in a new podcast, The Edge of the Road, which I’ve set up with a pilot episode, but I don’t have it at the iTunes Store yet. Stay tuned!

We had an evening of opening nights last night here in downtown Denver.  After dinner at the new Ocean Prime on their second evening of being open to the public, we walked down 15th Street to see “The Catch” on its opening night at the Space Theatre in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

We arrived at 1465 Larimer Street on foot in time to hear something like a baseball crowd cheering upstairs. The maître d’ sheepishly explained that it was the pre-shift meeting of the staff.  So they were psyched, and our waiter, Cameron, provided top-notch service with a certain grace and confidence.  He recommended a tower of seafood appetizers to start, and it arrived shrouded in cold smoke because of a piece of dry ice hidden in the display.  This added a flavor of mystery to the fresh and delicious crab legs, oysters, and shrimp.

“The Catch” is potent theater with strong acting and lots of laughs amidst its dark portrayal of the sometimes tragic limits of positive thinking.  A guy loses everything in the dot.com bubble and decides to regain his fortune by catching the record-breaking homerun ball to be hit by a character resembling Barry Bonds.  There is a crusty father visiting, who hates California — this plays well with a Colorado audience — a wise and discouraged soon-to-be-ex-wife, and another guy who happens to come up with the baseball without ever wanting it.  The play runs through February 26th, and if you’re in Denver I hope you’ll check it out.

I also like the lively video promo for the play that I’ve embedded in this post above (not viewable on your Kindle – sorry about that).  Something as simple as the images of the women painting lines on the stage makes you realize the incredible amount of work that goes into staging a high-quality play.

Mike Hartman and Lauren Klein

We saw “Eventide” last night at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It is a gritty and luminous affirmation of love, set on the eastern plains of Colorado.  The play follows a novel of the same title by Kent Haruf. The Denver Post got it right in this review, calling it “the role of a lifetime for Mike Hartman.”  He plays the lead, Raymond McPheron, one of two bachelor ranchers living in loneliness and transformed by love.

It could have been a gooey disaster, but for the dark counterweight of a family in the same community of Holt, Colorado, beset by crushing problems of poverty, mental illness, and violence.   Those scenes are powerful and difficult to watch, frankly. But when we got home, Darlene and I realized that they made real and more powerful the fragile flowering of love between Ray McPheron and Rose, the widowed social worker whose caseload includes the tragic family.  The counterpoint of the hell those kids inhabit is the story of another boy, played superbly by Augustus Lane Filholm, growing up wonderfully with his ailing and cranky grandfather.

Knowing that Mike Hartman and the actor who plays Rose, Lauren Klein, are real-life husband and wife adds to the pleasure of watching their awkward and victorious dance of love.

The play runs till February 27.  If you are in Denver, please don’t miss it, and spread the word!

I’m winding down after a couple of whirlwind days back in Denver, to attend a Board meeting of our condo association, mainly, and also a marathon public hearing at the Denver Planning Board regarding a comprehensive sign plan at Writer Square that has got the neighbors up in arms.  Actually, there was no one bearing arms, that I know of, at the hearing in a windowless room of the Webb Building.  But Writer Square residents had purchased 200 flashing red buttons, which we all wore and turned on at the cue from our leader.  Thus the Planning Board members looked out on a room of flashing red lights, a clever bit of theatre to underscore our worries about LED signs that threaten to make a sleepy little mixed-use area of Lower Downtown look like Times Square. 

The aroused residents at Writer Square , who will be most affected by the signage plan, really had their act together.  The developer’s team was professional, prepared, and convincing in its arguments that the new, improved signs were going to help retailers in the area survive the slump.  They had data, baby.  But the president of the Writer Square Condominium Association board, Dave Hannes, had a bed sheet.  As a long line of opponents addressed the Board, Dave and a helper stood on chairs to unfurl the sheet, which had been cut to the exact proportions of a key and controversial sign.  In the developer’s posterboard mockup of the sign, it looked sort of reasonable, at one corner of Writer Square.  But held up on one side of the room (see photo above), it looked way too big.

I read a resolution from our Board opposing the lighting plan, and lots of other neighbors joined the chorus of naysayers.  When the public hearing was closed, the Board voted overwhelmingly to deny the application.  I heard out in the hallway that this is not quite as final as it seems, because some zoning administrator has the final say.  But I can’t imagine that this person will defy the will of the Planning Board and an articulate mob of residents wearing flashing red lights.

Actually, my heart went out to the suits.  I’ve been there, a PR guy for a company trying to get something done that somehow had totally missed the will of the people.  It’s no fun. But if they’re smart, they’ll take this resounding No and start over, just as the Planning Board chair recommended.  They will figure out what we residents and neighbors think the essence of Writer Square really is, and then design a new signage plan that will give the poor retailers a shot at more business without seriously messing with the quality of our neighborhood.

I was glad to play a small part in the victory this evening.  But mainly I was in awe of the process. The members of that Planning Board must sit through the most boring, detailed, arcane hearings known to a city.  And they were totally into it. They knew the ordinances, and they asked sensible questions and came to a wise decision.  And we the people had an opportunity to make our voices heard.  It was stunning.

Tomorrow afternoon I fly back to Boston to resume Cambridge life, and I’ll be working on the Kindle Chronicles podcast on the last day before deadline, on Friday midnight.  Whew. Our own condo Board meeting went late last night, too, and I can barely remember what we were grappling with.

I keep thinking of Teddy Kennedy, sitting through endless hearings during 47 years in the Senate.  News of his memoir leaked out today, and I’ll be sure to buy it as soon as it’s available on Kindle.  I’m curious to learn how he found the patience and commitment to outlast his own limitations and resistance to the ordinary. I want to learn more from him, as I continue the work I occasionally do in groups of people trying to get it right.