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…
Test Taking I am sitting in room 223 of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice on the campus of University of San Diego. I am sitting here more of less quietly while sixteen students in the graduate business school program, in search of their MBA degrees are taking the final exam in my GSBA 520 Advanced Corporate Finance course. The exam has been underway for about 35 minutes so far and the…
Methods of Expression I got into a funny debate with my birthday-boy nephew last weekend while we were all gathered out in Joshua Tree. There was no set agenda, but rather a loose schedule of dinners and a few hikes with the rest of the time left largely unstructured for people to do as they please and commune both with one another and the surrounding desert landscape. The Airbnb that was the central gathering spot…
Tongue-Tied Sometimes I have to struggle to find a good title for a story or, indeed, find a good story. My friend Gary, who reads and comments on almost every story I write has recently told me that it is only logical that I will run out of things to say and stories to write and I have challenged that. I said that so long as I have breath and can get around and do…