Have time, will travel

Here's one advantage to my being semi-retired while my wife Jane continues to work away in the salt mine: I get to be the eye-candy when I tag along with her on a business trip.

It was a role reversal to be sure. During my working life, Jane would often accompany me on business trips. A recent trip to Alabama was my first opportunity to tag along with her. She went to meetings. I went to the golf course.

I blogged recently on the do's and don'ts of being eye candy.

The point here is that one of the consequences of retirement and the empty nest is having the time and making the time to travel. And it's all made easier by the fact that technology makes it possible to stay connected to the part-time writing I've been doing to fill in the gaps of my semi-retirement.

I contribute to four blogs, writing about 15 posts a week on cooking, Baby Boomer issues and New Hampshire politics.

Being on the road with Jane gave me the best of both worlds. She worked and I played. And I worked around my play.

I look at travel as a form of continuing education. And what an education we received during our tour of Birmingham.

The city was once considered the most segregated in the country, a city where the separation of blacks and whites, the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine was played out for decades after the city arose from literally nothing soon after the Civil War.

In my years, I wasn't exposed to the kind of segregation that was so ingrained in Birmingham. I'd read about it growing up, heard about it on the news. But a tour of the Civil Rights Institute and some other civil rights sites in Birmingham gave me a peek at a way of life that, while foreign to me, was all too familiar for so many.

Voting rights subjugated. "Colored Only" bathrooms and drinking fountains and a way of life dictated by whites. Protests and demonstrations put down by police dogs and fire hoses. The fire bombing of homes. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in which four girls died.

The attainment of civil rights was a civil war of its own.

Has it improved? Segregation is illegal, but like most cities, Birmingham is segregated by poverty. There are the business districts and the areas of the well-to-do, and there are the impoverished areas inhabited most often by blacks. It was that way in Birmingham.

While segregation is illegal, and the civil rights efforts of the Sixties and Seventies in Birmingham helped make it so, economic segregation is still hard at work.