A Twenty Year Time Capsule I stumbled across this story I wrote twenty years ago in rapt self-reflection. I find it interesting and worth sharing exactly because it was written in 2001, when the world was a very different place…at least from my vantage point. I have added [bracketed updated notations] as appropriate. I stand here at age 47 as a man in trouble. I believe my greatest assets are my ability to be candidly…
It’s Not About Justice, It’s About Peace We had dinner last night with two friends who have moved here from Phoenix. The overriding topic of the evening was about family relationships that have gone off the tracks. The similarities of our experiences, both cases involving animosities between in-laws and mutual senses that the basis for the animosity is much deeper than the superficial tipping-point incidents, were startlingly similar. One of the funnier similarities was that…
It’s Raining, It’s Pouring Here we are in the middle of August and I’m putting on extra clothes for warmth. That’s right, its turned suddenly downright chilly on the hilltop at 62 degrees. It will be in the 90’s again next week, so I’m just going to enjoy it. Naturally, this was the day I planned for a team of laborers under the direction of Handy Brad to lay out the DG paths and spread…
Perspective I’m looking out at this new house across the ravine from my hilltop. It’s white and stands out in contrast to the surrounding chaparral of greens and beige rocks. I have watched this house being built for more than the last two years. It took so long for two reasons. It’s being built by the future inhabitant and he unfortunately had an OTJ accident that caused the project to get delayed by some eight…
By the Sea I’ve never been all that mesmerized by the ocean the way some people are. I’ve always thought of people as either seashore or mountain people when it comes to where they position themselves in August. When I was a rookie in banking lo those forty-five years ago, one of the factoids I gathered up that first hot down summer in the city for me, was that when you reached the exalted position…
Into the Wild No, this story is not going to be about Chris McCandless sitting on top of an old bus at the base of Denali waiting to die of hunger. Emile Hirsch played that role well in 2007 and Sean Penn directed it like he himself saw that there was no tomorrow. That story was about a privileged kid who wanted to test himself to the limit and took a journey of enlightenment that…
The Natural If you like baseball and if you like Robert Redford, I would hope that you’ve seen the movie The Natural. It’s a 1984 classic that has a great supporting cast with Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Bassinger, Barbara Hershey, and Wilford Brimley. It tells the faintly Twilight Zone-like story of a rookie who has an athletic gift (embodied in a magical bat hewn from the timber of a lightning-struck tree that somehow symbolizes…
Made in the Shade I am half Slovak and half Italian in origin. Since I was raised by my mother and like to think that I am following more in her footsteps than those of my father, I always feel more Slovak than Italian. That said, I did live in Rome, Italy for three years of high school, a very formative period in anyone’s life and I do more-or-less speak Italian. I am very comfortable…
Every Which Way But Sideways It’s Sunday night and today was a very lazy day on the hilltop for both Kim and me. I put in some time on my expert case and before I knew it it was almost 10am on another perfect San Diego summer morning. Mid-80’s with lots of sun and no humidity (ho-hum, just the usual). My agenda was to get the plants I bought yesterday down the hillside to the…
Shortening Life For years we all lived with the fears of the two-headed health monster snatching us before our prime. While it is probably hard to deny that both heart disease and cancer are strongly genetically-linked, I always considered heart disease to be a lifestyle disease and cancer a genetically-predispositioned disease. I can almost hear the uncomfortable rustling of people who immediately disagree with my characterization for some personal experiential reason. We all have friends…