The Mouth of Truth During high school, there were several “low hanging fruit” ways we would do what young men all over the world try to do, which was to meet young women. When you are an expat living in Rome you have several distinct advantages. The first is that there are a constant year-round flow of American young women traveling either with or without their families around Europe, and no trip to Europe is…
Tho Tho Thore Do you remember that old superhero joke about Thor, the God of lightning and thunder that wields his mighty hammer across the heavens? He wakes up after a drunken one-night stand somewhere on the other side of the tracks in Valhalla and has the familiar awkward issue of waking up in some unknown mere mortal’s boudoir. So, he stands up and does what a Germanic God of mythology is supposed to do,…
Of Fleas and Flies When Thomas was a kid in early grade school, he would come over to stay with me and we would often work together on writing projects. I don’t know if he liked doing it because he is a natural writer or if he just wanted to mimic me, but he still writes a bit, so I like to think he at least enjoyed it. I think it was while I owned…
Ohmmmmmmicron I’m a traveling man again this week. As I’ve perhaps mentioned more times than I care to count, I get more and more inclined to stay put the older I get, but I am nonetheless traveling this week and the one thing I know about myself is that I can shift gears when needed and revert to traveler mode when I need to. There must be a part of my cortex that knows how…
The Disney Machine Special Edition To the many people who come to and love Disney every year, I cannot ignore the need to write about this iconic place that has become synonymous with American culture as I spend my one allotted day here. We got in last night at around 10pm after wrestling with the normal array of rental car and direction issues. We even kicked off our visit to the heartland by stopping at…
Kumon When we lived in New York City I used to ride down Seventh Avenue, which turned into Varick Street at Clarkson Street, where my youngest son Thomas’ high school was located. Somewhere along that length of Seventh or maybe Varick, I would see a curious sign on a storefront. It was called Kumon with the “o” in the name formed by a round little face with two wide-set eyes and a straight little line…
Tolkien Spoken Here I spent my middle school years in the back-woods of South Central Maine. I guess that helped make me, in part, a Mainiac. We were living in Poland Spring, the scene of oh so many stories. Poland Spring was an old-world resort for the carriage trade of Boston and New York going back as long as 1794 when Hiram Ricker “discovered” that the combination of the fresh spring water, devoid of most…
Early to Rise As I have thought many times, I am both blessed and cursed with an overactive mind. I have read up on sleep patterns and all the ancient proverbs about sleep and they all gravitate to the theme that it is healthier and more productive to set a pattern of sleep such that you go to bed earlier and rise earlier. Some say this is the wisdom of Ben Franklin, some say it…
The House in the Clouds Twenty-six years ago, Keanu reeves made a little movie that didn’t get much attention, only scores a 6.7 on the IMDB index and co-starred Anthony Quinn and Giancarlo Giannini. It was Alfonso Arau’s (the guy who made Like Water for Chocolate and Three Amigos) A Walk in the Clouds. It tells the story of a man who meets a woman in need after he returns from WWII. She is part…
The Sovereign State of AT&T When I was in college and studying Latin American political history, we were reviewing the recent political changes in Chile. While a small country, Chile was symbolic because it was very much an isolated country on the far side of the world. In the days before the Panama Canal, anything on the Pacific side of the Andes was a long way from home and if you went th Chile, unlike…