This morning I am on a plane to San Francisco. This was not a planned trip, but rather was an anticipated trip that I knew would come sooner or later and may well not be the last of these trips in the near future. You see, I’m going to visit a long-time friend who is not well. I don’t use the term pilgrimage lightly just to refer to a casual trip to visit a friend.…
About a week ago my daughter Carolyn, who is the source of many of the great new innovations in my aging life (she’s the one who put me onto stretch – U, among other things), told me I needed to get an Oura Ring. An Oura Ring is a “smart” ring worn on your finger (preferably the left index finger) that tracks health and wellness data using sensors rather than a screen or buttons. It…
When we are kids, we revel in having fun. The world revolves around having fun at the early stages of life. You can see the instinct clearly in Buddy, who is still a young dog at three. When he wakes up in the morning, all he wants to do is play. He will come up to our faces in bed and try to convince us that its time to get up to play. He is…
In a few weeks Kim is heading off for her 50th high school reunion in Wabash, Indiana, her home town and where she spent the first 20 years of her life. Kim is not only connected to Wabash for family reasons…though she has very little family left there now, but also because it’s where her musical roots began. Over the years that Kim and I have been together, she went back to Wabash twice to…
It’s that funny transitional time of the summer when every morning starts out in a cloud and we wait and see when this hilltop will break through to the sun. It always does because summer is simply not a time for rain on this hilltop. I remember when I lived in Maine for three years back in the mid-60s. I worked on the golf course each of those three summers and so I was acutely…
I keep finding reasons to think about our friend Bill (of Dulcinea and Bill). He is gradually becoming one of my heroes and it has nothing to do with the fact that he seems to like reading my blog stories. What has caused me to think and write about him again this morning is the fact that I am taking Kim off for a routine colonoscopy this morning and we have been living with the…
I have been assaulted this morning by a wave of Supreme Court decisions which have flexed the muscles of the conservative majority with 6-3 votes which have strongly favored gun rights in America and supported the Trump anti-immigration policies that are all about restricting asylum seekers from our shores and deporting specific immigrants like Haitians and Syrians who we are generically deeming undesirable by some. Given that SCOTUS is anxious to go on their summer…
Kim finished her show yesterday and I attended both showings. It was an excellent show which I feel represents another significant upgrade to the production value of her vocal group’s showmanship. By my rough estimate, Kim spent 600 hours over six months on the project. She has been immersed in these 24 songs for the better part of six months. Unlike the last show, which I also thought was a meaningful upgrade in performance quality,…
About 30 years ago, I was at a Cornell recognition function (I believe it was a Presidents Club gathering) in New York City, and a pleasant young woman came up to me wearing a badge that identified her as part of the development office at the University. Nothing about that was unusual because this sort of function always had lots of development officers schmoozing alumni like me. What was different was that she told me…
My oldest son Roger shares my initials. I am Richard Albert and he is Roger Andrew. We have always figured that there was some benefit in sharing the same initials since monogrammed things like satchels and miscellaneous leather goods always look good wearing some intergenerational aging. We also both like the toughness and rugged image of the curled horned beast that protects the heard and roams the mountainside. I have to take responsibility for carrying…