When I was a teenager, a German exchange teacher came to our  high school for a year. Herr Busch arrived in America with his wife, teenage daughter and Volkswagen. His goal was to “teach us a little German” and travel the entire United States. He achieved both goals and a bit more.

On the first week of school, Mr Busch announced that since our schools were so far behind the German schools, his daughter, though in our classes, would be having a holiday for a year. “She already knows everything being taught here,” he declared. True or not, he doomed his daughter to a lonely year.

The following week Mr Busch arrived in the classroom waving a speeding ticket and declaring America’s traffic laws absurd. His citations piled up, and his VW began to acquire battle scars from daily combat duty against slow moving American traffic.

Flash forward thirty years. My husband and I are taking our first trip to Europe. We are going to Prague, the birthplace of my grandfather, and then plan on driving a triangle to Munich, Berlin and then back to Prague. Our tiny rental car is an anemic Opel.

All goes well until we hit the German autobahn where I promptly have a private panic attack. “You can’t drive on this,” my brain screams. Audis, Porsches, BMWs and Mercedes are whooshing past us at speeds of 100 to 120 mph. They dart sharply from lane to lane never reducing speed and clinging a foot from our rear bumper when waiting to resume life in the fast lane. Every one of these uber-drivers is male.

Since my spouse and I have an unspoken agreement to share driving on road trips, I forced myself to calm down, play fair and take my turns at the wheel. Fortunately, adrenalin and survival instinct kicked in. I learned the true meaning of rest stops: that’s where you pry your white knuckles off the steering wheel.

I recently returned to Germany, and driving remains an extreme sport. Driving 85 mph in an underpowered Renault Twingo, I was passed on the left by a Porsche going about 140 mph. Then the driver suddenly cut across the two right lanes to exit, never braking until he was halfway down the ramp.

I’ve been known to complain about the nitpicking enforcement of the speed laws by our State Patrol. I suggest we send some of our overzealous troopers to Germany where there is plenty of real work to be done. Herr Busch apparently was not an anomaly.

My husband adores another woman. Since the lady is 75 years old and lives in Italy, I do not feel threatened. In fact, I understand his infatuation. Being a lover of beauty myself, I must agree with my spouse… Sophia Loren is one of the world’s most beautiful women. How could I not love a woman who said, “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

Sophia and my husband go back a long way. In our 46 years of happily wedded life, he’s made no attempt to conceal his awe of her perfection.

We do differ, however, on Sophia’s presence in our lives. A number of years ago I was out of town and came home to find  every movie that Ms. Loren had ever graced on our Netflicks movie queue. “Are you sure you want to do this?” I inquired. The answer was obviously “yes” as we waded through months of films.

Sophia’s parts in the earliest movies were, to put it generously, minimal. The quality of these films can be gleaned from the titles: Quo Vadis?, 1950, Woman of the Red Sea, 1952, Two Nights With Cleopatra, 1953, Attila, Scourge of God, 1953, Too Bad She’s Bad, 1954. When an Italian movie is bad, it is egregiously so. At least I could laugh while my spouse was being transfixed by this woman’s feminine charms.

As the years progressed, her films grew in quality. Who would have guessed that the twelve year old who had the nickname Stuzzicadenti,”toothpick”, would become a first rate actress and unrivaled diva?

Click here for a comprehensive view of this amazing woman.

Dedicated travelers come in two varieties: the first want to touch down everywhere on the globe, the second keep revisiting a select group of locales and seek to know them intimately. I fall into the second group. I love getting to the rental car counter and politely declining the proffered map. But no matter how many times I visit my favorite places, surprises, changes and discoveries await.

Albuquerque is a city for which I have much affection and familiarity. My visits number in the hundreds. Nevertheless, I recently had a unique experience.

Being an architect groupie, I was not unfamiliar with the name Bart Prince. This highly creative architect was born in Albuquerque in 1947.  I had seen many photos of his work but had never tracked down the homes. Unexpectedly finding myself with a few unscheduled hours in Albuquerque, I asked my waitress at the French Bakery if she knew where any of Bart Prince’s  houses were located. She did not know his name but did know the location of  “some crazy, really cool houses” in Nob Hill. Knowing that Prince had designed  homes in this area, I asked for specifics. Although lacking any knowledge of the compass points, the young lady did give good directions. “Take Carlisle two lights down to the university past Lomas and veer right. Hope you find them ,” she cheerfully added.

Minutes later we were standing in sheer delight in front of two adjacent Bart Prince homes. The style can only be described as the Jetsons meet Frank Lloyd Wright. These dwellings are like the ultimate tree houses. One was diagonally perched on the roof of an ordinary, old, adobe casita, an exuberantly successful adaptation.

Fortunately, there were no “For Sale” signs in sight. I would have been tempted.

I’m going to put a sign on my refrigerator that says, “Remember Galileo.” I am struggling to keep my current frustration in perspective.

Carl Hiassen, Florida’s satirical writer, stated in a recent Smithsonian magazine essay that, “the human race is actually de-evolving, that we are moving backward on the evolutionary scale… slipping backward into the primal ooze.”

I agree. An uncomfortable percentage of the populace is embracing superstition, ideologues and junk science with alarming frequency. Take evolution, for example. Whether we humans believe in it or not, evolution rolls merrily along unaffected by our  thoughts on the subject. I wish all doctors would use the word “evolve” when telling patients why the antibiotic they are begging for no longer works. “The microbes have evolved to be resistant.” Physicians are missing a teaching moment.

There’s a high probability that future generations will look back on our current denial of global warming with amazement. Does the ice of Greenland have to melt and inundate New Jersey before we get it? Do we even know that New Jersey is a state in America?

It’s not a punishable offense to deny the knowledge the world’s greatest thinkers have gained for us. But it is downright unenlightened to say nothing of arrogant.

Science writer  K.C. Cole states, “We don’t even know what it is possible to know.”  I would add that tossing away our hard won accumulated knowledge no matter how small that body of knowledge might be isn’t the brightest action.

Students and teachers are heading back to school this week. I believe it would behoove us on the teaching end of the equation to remember that we should not teach our students what to think but rather how to think.

I love clean beginnings and endings. Summer sits neatly between the bookends of Memorial Day and Labor Day. As we head toward the later, a summer summary is in order.

I will remember the summer of 2010 as the year that bad gardeners were good ones. Plentiful rain alternating with sun created rain forest conditions. Everything shot up like a teenage boy. Our cup plant soared to an amazing height of 9 feet, 11 inches. Flowers I don’t even remember planting magically appeared in the front yard. The fields around us were so lush our farmers had to work nonstop to bring crops in. Hay wagons were everywhere.

The animals must have sensed the abundance. We were tripping over a bumper crop of chipmunks in our driveway. Raccoon families proliferated, and red and gray squirrels bristled in all directions off our bird feeders. The bird population ranged from hummingbirds to bald eagles. The insect count per square inch of our yard was astronomical.

Vegetable gardens overflowed making us all locavores. What we didn’t grow, friends and neighbors supplied. I resorted to that big cookbook in cyberspace several times for advice on freezing piles of zucchini and beans. These souvenirs from summer will be welcome when the snow flies.

Our beach glass collection is a barometer of time spent outside. Since I can hardly lift the bowl, I know ample time was spent on the shore.

The goldenrod is already all brassy, and the monarchs and many birds are heading for their second summers. We, however, are not snowbirds. We will stay put and start looking for more tell-tale signs of Fall’s approach. After all the exuberant growth and greenness of summer, it’s time for a rest.