Flashbacks From The "Athens Of The West"

Before I made my happy little stroll to the City of Roses, I used to enjoy my time in another cute town with its own fanciful nickname; Boulder, Colorado. I always loved walking around Boulder with my flash camera taking pictures of all the beautiful scenery along Boulder Creek and down to the Pearl Street Mall and west to Chautauqua Park. If you haven’t been to Boulder, I strongly recommend you visit sometime, as it is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen in the world so far in my life, along with Dingle in Ireland, Portland, and Eugene.



Did you know that Boulder is commonly called the "Athens of the West"? Boulder has a rich and colorful history that goes back well as early as 1858, when prospectors from the mountains put up tents at Red Rocks just out of Boulder Canyon and Arapahoe Indians were nearby and were invited to feast with them after they hunted an ox. In fact, one tribe member was told he had a dream a great flood washed away the Native Indians but avoided the prospectors, a harbinger that the prospectors would stay. They found gold flakes in the mouth of the canyon, but when a cold winter came and complicated their plan to gather all the gold in one piece, Alfred A. Brookfield decided to set up a town there and became the city’s first president. Prospectors started gathering, making farms and raising livestock, and before Colorado was no longer part of the Nebraska Territory, the first building of what is now the University of Colorado was founded, now called Old Main. Then when railroads were built, tourism became a massive industry in Boulder, and many people started coming out just to see the mountains and for health, and then Boulder (which is the health food capital of the U.S) built the Sanitarium, where they have a spa, health food market, and country club. Then shortly after, the famous Chautauqua Park was commenced, a beautiful natural park, dining hall and auditorium where you can either just enjoy a nice serene and peaceful stroll through the park, or see silent movies or magicians or bird-watch.



Do you drink Celestial Seasonings tea? Celestial Seasonings was founded in Boulder too! The moment Boulder became considered a beautiful city and not just a tourist hotspot anymore, Boulder was always called the "Athens of the West" and they decided to further the true quality of the title, Boulder would undergo a huge architectural project, with so many buildings built from marble, the Carnegie Library being built as a replica of a Greek temple, banning saloons, and planting trees and bushes and gardens everywhere to make the entire city feel pleasant. With the Boulder Creek running through the middle of the town, you can spend a whole day walking through the city enjoying the beauty of nature all around you!



http://www.boulderteahouse.com/

One place I especially enjoyed spending much time was at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse. It was designed by over forty Tajik artists to mirror the cultural beauty of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The mayor of Tajikistan came to Boulder in 1987 to announce the presentation of a tea house to the city in celebration of established sister city ties. In central Asia, teahouses have always served as gathering places where friends come to talk, play chess, etc, many of them designed with Persian art, with patterns and motifs from nature and color. And right in the middle of the teahouse is this large pool which features seven hammered copper sculptures, all based on the 12th century poem "The Seven Beauties" in which a princess from each of seven different nations narrates a fable that expresses important cultural values. That is my dream place to perform poetry and art live to the public. The Boulder Theatre and the Glen Huntington Bandshell would be gorgeous places too to recite. Wonder if there is someplace in the City of Roses you can get the Pleine Lune?



Whenever I wanted to unwind after a long day in Boulder, I always went down to Chautauqua Park or the Pearl Street Mall. The Pearl Street Mall is no ordinary mall at all, in fact it is one of a kind. Despite Gap, Banana Republic, and Abercrombie & Finch crawling their fingers into the market, overall the stores are all original and independent businesses. I loved having lunch many days at BD’s Mongolian Grill. Have you ever been to a Mongolian grill? If not (whether you eat meat or not) you must give into this experience! First, you select all the delicious veggies, meats, and pasta you want in a buffet style just like you do at Country Buffet or during your matutinal continental breakfast run, then you pick out of a selection of many different sauces and oils, from black bean to honey hoison to (my favorite) Mojo, a Caribbean sweet and tangy sauce. Finally, you hand your bowl to a chef and they put your cuisine on this giant griddle, using this giant metal sticks to cook the food to absolute perfection, soaking the flavor into all the food and making the meat (if you choose to have it) cooked just right. If you haven’t tried it, you don’t know what you’re missing! Being the happy vegetarian I am, you'd be surprised how filling mongolian broccoli tastes!



The Pearl Street Mall also has a lot of outdoor entertainment all along the alluring streets. I remember a few years ago visiting Boulder once a week and watching Kenneth Lightfoot, a friendly entertainer from South Africa with his trusty green lovebird on his shoulder, throwing playing cards from the sidewalk up onto the rooftop of a business on the corner of 14th and Pearl and making it every time, even on a windy day. They always have guitarists out there on the benches too, which I happily contribute a dollar to their guitar cases every time I hear beauty. Hey, maybe I should go out there and do that sometime, I could make money to contribute to more environmental groups!



Often I just loved heading down to the Crystal Dragon or the Indigo Rose to pick up incense and hear Arabian and Tibetan music, or just step into the art galleries, look at all the paintings, and get inspirations for new poems (a good number of my poems are inspired by art). If the world is my oyster shell, I think I found a pearl there!



Of course, there's no pearl more sentimental to me than Denver Academy, a most special private school. I graduated from high school there as valedictorian (3.98 Grade Point Average) and mentioned how happy I was there in a more brief degree, with so many memories I cherish with all dear heart. But they all go far beyond my hero, Mr. Ernewein. Throughout the run of this blog, I’ll tell you about all my other friends, companions, amigos, camarillas, etc. Right now, I feel like talking about the mission statement there and all their creative teaching methods. This is their mission statement which I took pride in in all four years I was there, which I am quoting from their official web site you can find here!

http://www.denveracademy.org

Their goal is basically "to help students who are functioning below grade level in some or all of the basic skill areas and who have experienced some negative impact on their self-concept, which it is not unusual for students with such backgrounds to become easily discouraged and to be anxious about exerting effort in academic areas for fear of not doing well."

They also mention that "some of our students have identifiable sources of learning interference, such as dyslexia or attention deficits. Others have a history of generalized underachievement, usually because their learning style is not being considered in their current academic situation. After enrollment, the students show a significant increase in self-confidence and good study habits. The students flourish within the structured, closely supervised, and highly personal environment of Denver Academy."

So many of my most precious memories revolve around both the old and new campuses. I remember sitting in Mr. Wood’s class as a freshman in the Core Division on the original Denver Academy campus ground on Race and Mississippi and reading "Animal Farm", "1984", "Watership Down", "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "All’s Quiet On The Western Front", and making this huge colorful travel brochure to the rabbit warren out of neon cardboard paper and pasting with super glue pictures of rabbits and text for a project on "Watership Down" (I recommend that book to all of you) and creating this huge diarama with a group on the Maycomb County village in To Kill A Mockingbird, complete with Atticus Finch, the courthouse, Boo Radley’s tree, everything.

I remember being in Special Studies Week and doing all kinds of unique learning skills like creating kites, looking for themes in Stephan King horrors, identifying irony in The Simpsons, and learning how to make these exotic graphs with Texas Instruments 83 Model calculators, and my favorite: learning about the beat poetry movement with Mr. Ernewein.

I remember the golden age with Mr. Ernewein, from building a staircase out of Styrofoam, rainbow popsicle sticks and metal hinges for his Algebra II class in a project on measuring height and width in geometric shapes, to running cross-country with him and Charlie Campbell, Weston Wells, Kevin Beasley, Rob Buff, Billy Muniz (we loved emphasizing his stardom by his last name, LOL!) John Dreiling, and Andy Franz among others, who he was my coach for three years and we ran all over the middle of Colorado, from Bear Creek to Georgetown to Loveland to Sheridan, even during the heart of a blizzard in Colorado Springs with our small shorts on, to reading "Lord Of The Flies", "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings", "Night", "Into The Wild" and (my personal favorite) "Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in his literature class during my sophomore year and writing musical comparison presentation essays on Counting Crows, Dave Matthews band and Indigo Girls, along with my first batch of poetry and some narrative and technical writing in my sophomore English class, to even spending time after-school helping him put together the school’s first-ever paperback publication of original submitted student and teacher literary works which Corey Sandoval creatively titled "Voice In DA Crowd". I will never forget those memories with him, along with a whole other batch of them.

I remember getting up on stage for the first time when I was a sophomore, playing Yussel in the Winter 2000 production "Fiddler On The Roof", experiencing all that pressure and stage fright from the great drama teacher Leigh-Ann Jensen but learning so much from her through the 2 1/2 years I was in drama about acting and respecting her so much, then with my newly-found confidence coming back with a vengeance to star in Dead Poets Society as one of the students (I stood up on the table at the end of the play upon default of another student not present that evening), then playing a French foreign-exchange boy in “Marcus Is Walking”, a clumsy witness to an attempted murder in some comedy compilation program, and finally (the role I’m most proud of), one of the leading roles, Leonato, in Shakespeare’s "Much Ado About Nothing". I remember having to powder my hair salt-and-pepper to play the role and then coming home to see the huge darkness in the shower water as I rinsed it out of my hair. (giggles)

I remember when everyone at Denver Academy bid farewell to the old campus on Race and Mississippi and moved to a new, even bigger campus, which was an abandoned hospital for curing patients of leukemia, just off of Iliff and Interstate 25. I remember being moved from Core to Prep and having two years of English and Literature with Ms. Jones, another teacher I have so much respect for and many memories, and two years of science courses with Mr. Petry. I remember how terribly petrified I was when I took Digital Electronics in my junior year with Mr. Petry, and how his usual teaching style is to discipline students into keeping them awake and motivated with the use of pressure and warning, and how the strictness was too much for me and made me tear up and then Mr. Petry and I got to know each other so much better ever since then and then he taught me in a different approach, and how we continued to develop a friendship and spent some lunchtimes at Tokyo Joes and talking about all sorts of things, from college thoughts to Denver Academy to personal life.

I remember meeting Spanish teacher Ms. Doyle for the first time, and learning basic Spanish skills from her, and then becoming a best friend to her and sharing poetry with her and listening to her strum her guitar (I took her to the Shakira concert in 2003) I remember taking art courses with Ms. Dunlap, who is also one of my best friends, and making acrylic still-frames, painting, and using the potters wheel and making and glazing ceramic bowls and cups. She and Ms. Doyle even attempted to help get me on the Oprah Show because they believed my poetry was incredible and had to be shared to the world (I didn’t get on the show, but I got an autographed picture of Oprah and a friendly letter from her telling it is possible she’d put the thought up for consideration in the future and even if that didn’t happen, she found my poetry to be beautiful!) She is also a very special friend to me, along with the original art teacher Ms. Twarogowski, who just had the cutest smile and one of the most uplifting and happy spirits I’ve ever seen in anyone my whole life. She is that kind of person who could contagiously bring a smile to your face even during the coldest, darkest January morning. Ms. Erlandson is another teacher there that also had that wonderful uplifting spirit!

Finally, I remember standing up on that podium on graduation day, in my blue graduation outfit with the yellow rope over my shoulders, approaching the microphone where headmaster Jim Loan was to invite me up to say my valedictorian speech, literally feeling like I was going to burst into tears every second through, but bravely speaking my lungs out, watching some people in the audience below crying themselves, until finally reaching a catharsis of emotion in the end and crying silently in joy as I returned to my seat. Then after getting my high school diploma and getting off the stage, I remember Jim Loan saying my speech deeply got to his heart and he found himself feeling weak in a beautiful state, and my other teachers all giving me their hands.

These are my most prized memories of Denver Academy, which I consider so far to be my golden age of my life. I miss Denver Academy with all my heart and wish I could spend more time visiting there. I guess I miss Denver Academy too much, but I am happy I am, for I want every student and teacher there who’s reading this to know that!



Yep, Boulder and Denver will always feel like home to me, and is the indisputable childhood paradise to me, the former being the "Gateway to the Glaciers", the "Athens of the West". It is my everyday holiday, it is my whistle stop, it is my hamlet, it is my locus, it is my goldmine, it is my élan vital. I’d take a Fair Winds hot air balloon ride over the city everyday if I could. But, I have a journey to complete, a dream to fulfill, and the world is my neighborhood so I gave many more neighbors in many more blocks to visit and have chamomile tea with! And here in the City of Roses, I already am most blessed to feel this similar warmth like I did in Colorado, from all the wonderful friends who keep KBOO singing, to wonderful professors like Darcene and Jesse who made "Speech in Communication" such an exciting lecture to attend, to my next door neighbor Ferguson! :)



Some Japanese proverb I value dearly says, "Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods" So go out there and find your laughing place!

"Everybody's got a laughing place
A laughing place to go
Take a frown, turn it upside down
And you'll find yours we know"

If honey fun is what we bring, boy are we in luck! (does happy dance down the primrose path)

Love,
Noah Eaton