Big whopping "Zero" makes this birthday special!

Another birthday and it's time to celebrate.

There are birthdays and then there are birthdays! This one comes complete with a big whopping "zero" to remind me that time and tide wait for no man.

With that in mind I've spent the last year out and about -- Boston and New York, Vegas and Salt Lake City; Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon; Horseshoe Bend, Antelope Canyon and the Grand Staircase Esplanade! Later this month the always lovely Miss Wendy and I will be cruising about the Caribbean and we'll finish up the year back in the Big Apple.

I began 2017 by seeing "Dear Evan Hansen" and "Chicago" on Broadway and will end it in December with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall and, back on Broadway, seeing "Come From Away"! Filling up the time and space from there to here was a smorgasbord of outings with friends -- dinner dates and movies, parties, holiday meals, walks, hikes and meaningful chats; and, certainly worth noting, a mini-reunion with a few folks who I worked and played with at the Red and Black, UGA's student newspaper, when Richard Nixon was still president, computers were the size of a ginormous room and fed with punch cards, and an apple was a snack that, ostensibly, would keep a doctor away if eaten once a day!

So, how old now? Well, just count the candles!

It's also been a year when I've been lucky enough to spend some quality time with my brothers, traveling with them to a few of the top spots on my ever-diminishing bucket list; doing, um, family stuff with my extended family and staying close and busy with my remarkable and amazing daughter, Lauren, and son-in-law Josh. And then there's Bailey and Avi, my absolutely perfect grandkids who fill my life each day with renewed wonder and constant love.

Oh, there's also the lovely Miss Wendy, my wife, partner and soulmate who has been willing to put up with my nonsense for well over four decades; the person most responsible for keeping some semblance of balance in my life with her half-glass-filled vibe and upbeat attitude.

But I digress ... and where's an editor when you need one! The point of this post is to share a bit of distilled wisdom it's taken me nearly seven decades to learn. Plastics, despite the advice offered up by Mr. McGuire to Benjamin, isn't the answer to the big question of life. Who Knew!

Okay, truth to tell, this note is actually my incredibly long and windy way to thank you, all my Facebook friends, for your recent birthday wishes. It's nice to know that, if only for a moment, a gaggle of family and friends was thinking of me and wishing me well on this special day!

National treasure hidden away in plain sight!

Antelope Canyon: A surrealist dream come to life.

Antelope Canyon spread all about, a swirl of colors and twisting shapes, beautiful and poetic. Climbing down into the lower canyon is like tumbling into a serpentine maze that manages to be both claustrophobic and expansive. The hidden space -- it's beneath the scarred and sun-bleached landscape of northern Arizona -- is just one of many highlights on a recent trip out West with two of my brothers and a nephew.

The journey began in another colorful place, Las Vegas, a jarring mix of ginormous hotels and casinos, souvenir shops and bars, upscale retail stores, malls and specialty restaurants. Hordes of tourists, conventioneers and locals jostle their way along the city's neon-soaked strip, the air heavy with the stench of cigarette smoke, hope, greed and, yes, sadness.

After all, only a week earlier a gunman had murdered 58 people attending a country music concert in Vegas and injured hundreds of others in what is now considered the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. That's not to suggest that the city has gone dark. It continues to twinkle, especially at night when a pleasing blend of music and lights offer up dreams of hedonistic delights that add weight and meaning to the city's marketing slogan, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!"

Las Vegas: Still twinkling despite recent tragedy.

For me and my traveling companions -- Gary, Larry and Ryan -- the city was mostly a footnote on this trip, a brief stop and gathering spot. Truth to tell, we were much more interested in spending time with Mother Nature then ogling showgirls or feeding the slots!

The good news is that it only takes a moment to shake the Vegas vibe and find a welcoming landscape of craggy hills and sun-baked plains nearby. I-15 splits Vegas and crawls across the southeast corner of Nevada, just touching the northwest tip of Arizona before playing out in southern Utah.

Mother Nature has done a splendid job here, filling the region with natural wonders and beauty: soaring mountains and majestic canyons; verdant meadows and burbling brooks; pristine rivers and lakes and an abundance of wildlife. So it's not at all surprising that the area has a number of state and national parks featuring a wide range of awesome sights.

Finally out and about, our little group took a short break at Valley of Fire State Park, 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. It's mostly a bleak and desolate prairie filled with brilliant formations of eroded sandstone and sand dunes, all aflame in shades of orange. The landscape is grand an unique, both bizarre and beautiful.

Zion National Park: Grand and Unique, stunning and beautiful.

Truth to tell, such words and thoughts could be mixed and matched and easily used to describe the half dozen or so places we visited over the next several days, including Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon and the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in Utah. We then turned south and, backtracking a few hours, explored the Glen Canyon National Recreation area and a couple of slot canyons buried in a rocky and remote area of Arizona known as the Navaho Nation Land.

The canyons, the last stop on our mystical and magical dance with Mother Nature, provided a colorful exclamation point for the journey. Only a day earlier we had been walking about the ancient hoodoos of Bryce Canyon -- tall, thin spires of rock that spilled across the landscape -- certain that we had been privy to the very best Gaia had to offer.

Au contraire mon ami!

Bryce Canyon: Bizarre hoodoos dot the landscape.

The lower Antelope Canyon, on the outskirts of Page, Ariz., is a surrealistic dream come to life, a glorious blend of light and color, eroded rock and Navaho sandstone. Flash floods helped form the undulating corridor, smoothing out hard edges over time and creating "flowing" shapes in the rock.

The canyon, opened to the public in the mid-1990s, is about 120 feet deep. You enter from above, gingerly working your way down a series of metal steps, in some spots having to squirm through small openings in the rock with little to hold onto. Once on the ground you'll have to weave your way along the twisting canyon floor, squeezing around spots where the path becomes pinched and outcroppings of rock block your path.

The traveling gang: Ron, Gary, Larry and Ryan.

The trip, of course, is worth the effort.

I've been fortunate enough to see a number of natural and man-made wonders in my life: the Grand Tetons and Grand Canyon; the Eiffel Tower and Tower of London; Masada and the Western Wall; the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge!

The Antelope Canyons easily rest alongside these other places as wonderful and wondrous. The lower canyon is both beautiful and awesome; its colors and shapes an ode to the quiet, unyielding power of nature. Given the right frame of mind, it's here and in other such sanctuaries that I find the static of life gives way to something grand and sacred, a national treasure hidden away in plain sight!

Las Vegas: Twinkling lights and a memorial for the dead

Vegas Strip remains bright and dazzling despite recent tragedy.

The first surprise when stepping onto the Las Vegas strip in early October is the weather. The blast furnace of summer has clicked off in recent days and been replaced with moderate temps that hover in the low 80s. It's still warm, but not unbearably hot, and crowds of tourists are out and about like bees in search of nectar.

For first-time visitors, getting around can be an unexpected challenge. The massive scale of the hotels and casinos that line Las Vegas Boulevard -- Caesars Palace and Circus Circus; the Luxor and MGM Grand; Bellagio, the Venetian and a dozen or so others -- give the impression that a festive playground is easily within reach. It's not.

The resorts are huge and trekking about is a tiresome and time-consuming affair. The illusion is only magnified when the sun goes down and the Vegas lights come fully alive, offering up a dazzling, multi-colored fantasy land.

Memorial honors 58 people killed by deranged gunman.

It's this twinkling world, filled with dreams of hedonistic delights that adds weight and meaning to the city's marketing slogan, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!" Tragically, the dream morphed into a nightmare earlier this month when a deranged gunman opened fire from his suite in a high-rise hotel, the Mandalay Bay, raking a nearby concert venue with thousands of rounds of gunfire.

In just a little over 10 minutes, the shooter managed to murder 58 people, injuring hundreds more in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. Police report that in the midst of one 31-second span, the shooter fired a staggering 280 rounds, roughly nine bullets every second.

I'm in Vegas to meet up with two of my brothers and  nephew, a brief stop and gathering spot for a trip that will take us across southern Utah to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park. But for the moment I have joined with dozens of other tourists to walk about a temporary memorial resting at the foot of the neon-soaked sign welcoming visitors to "fabulous" Las Vegas, Nevada!

And off in the distance a yuuuge golden blemish.

The space is filled with a jarring mix of balloons and banners, flowers, candles and personal notes and prayers for the victims. A line of wooden crosses, one for each person killed, cuts across the grounds, a sobering remembrance and reminder of this most recent madness.

This isn't the first such memorial I've visited. Last year I was in Orlando only weeks after 49 people were murdered at Pulse, a gay bar on the southern fringes of the downtown area. The Vegas memorial echoes the melancholy vibe found there and, sadly, in another few days, perhaps a week or two, the lawn here will be swept clean and Las Vegas will become yet another painful memory of a place where evil once visited.

The names of the dead and injured in attacks stretching back decades are mostly forgotten in a world moving at the speed of light. Inevitably, the locations are what we recall: Columbine, Blacksburg, Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood and Charleston; San Bernadino, San Ysidro, Washington, D.C. and Tucson.

City a jarring mixture of hope, greed and really expensive cars.

The full list spans the country. No region is immune to the momentary madness of mostly boys and men directed by hate, fear and a grotesque anger fueled by job and personal issues, teen angst and mental illness.

Our political leaders, starting with the yamster-in-chief in the Oval Office, have offered their thoughts and prayers while, yet again, failing to take any sort of legislative action to deal with the problem. Their tepid response, a predictable show of institutional madness, is simply to ignore the issue. It's a rancid position -- bought and paid for by the NRA -- that will certainly result in additional slaughter, thoughts and prayers!

Some "patriots" argue the lack of gun control, the shootings and mass murder, is the price of freedom. If that's the case then the cost is too high. That becomes clear in the heartbreak that hangs heavily above the Vegas strip this day and the knowledge that other innocent victims will be picking up the check in coming years.