Karen Schulz - Living My Dash

  October 13 – Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, Azores Today we docked at Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, Azores our first stop on this 45-day Mediterranean cruise. It is the largest and most populated of the Azore Islands. There are nine islands in total in the Azores, with Ponta Delgada being the heart of them all. We were looking forward to seeing the Sete Cidades Crater Lake . When people picture the Azores, in travel ads, guidebooks, or postcards, the view from the rim of the Sete Cidades caldera with the twin-colored lakes below is usually what is used to represent the area. The Sete Cidades Crater Lake is an active but dormant caldera, about 3 miles wide. Do you know what a caldera is? I had to look it up myself: it’s a large, bowl-shaped depression that forms after a volcano erupts and its magma chamber empties, causing the ground above it to collapse.   Inside the crater are two connected lakes, separated by a narrow bridge: the Blue Lake and the Green Lake. The lakes appe...

  My parents named me Karen June. I don’t mind Karen (even though someone decided it should be used to describe an unreasonable woman). But June always seemed out of place, like a borrowed word that didn’t quite belong to me. I sometimes wondered if my parents just liked the way it sounded with my first name, or if, perhaps, I was named after someone else. I’ll never know for certain. My mother passed away when I was twenty-three, long before it occurred to me to ask. My father’s been gone for nearly three decades now, and I never asked him either. And yet, today something changed. At the airport, standing in a TSA checkpoint line, an agent looked down at my passport and commented: “June. That’s my daughter’s name.”   That caught my attention, and curious, I asked, “How did you decide on that name?” “She was named after my father. He was a Junior, so we call her June ,” he replied. For a moment, the world went still. The hustle and bustle of the terminal faded as I...