When I’m 64 Today is Kim’s birthday, and yes, she turns 64 years old. So, naturally, the Beatles 1967 song from The Yellow Submarine album comes to mind. That song was written by John Lennon, who would be 82 this year and Paul McCartney, who is 80 years old this year. I am four years past that milestone birthday and that would hardly qualify as a milestone were it not for this very song. The…
Dismantling a Heritage When people ask me where I am from, my answer depends on the context of that particular exchange. If I am sitting having a long conversation with someone, I explain that I grew up all over the world and that there are parts of me that started in Venezuela and Costa Rica, wound their way through all of the major parts of the United States from California to the Midwest to the…
Paging Doctor Cohen with an Assist by Cliff Davis We are spending the weekend at Camp Davis on Lake Ariel in the Poconos, the lovely vacation home of our dear friends Cliff and Linda. I met Cliff and Linda fifty-one years ago on the second floor of University Halls Dormitory number Four (called U-Hall 4 by its denizens). The greatest difference between this U-Hall and the other five identical cinderblock post-WWII buildings was that unlike…
Father’s Day Technically and even though it has been celebrated in other forms since the Middle Ages, Father’s Day was first celebrated in the United States on the third Sunday of June in 1910. At 112 years old, the celebratory day still remains three years behind the recognition of Mother’s Day, which began in 1907. But officially, it wasn’t really nationally established until 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson made an official proclamation as to its…
The Day Before the Day Today is a perfect San Diego June day. The sun rose at 5:38am and there was no June Gloom marine layer of mist or fog. The high is projected to be 75 degrees with a humidity level of 50%. By the time the sun sets at 8pm, making today the longest daylight day of the San Diego year, we will be ready for our roadtrip. Technically, the longest day should…
Eyelids of Morning I am feeling tired this morning. My CPAP tells me I slept 6 hours and 39 minutes last night, which excludes the half hour I was awake at 3am, taking some Tylenol for my aching shoulder and reading a few emails. At that time of day there are usually only junk spam emails and one important email with Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From An American, her daily recap of how the events…
Downhill Racer Last night I made Kim watch A History of Violence, the 2005 film directed by David Cronenberg and staring Vigo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris and William Hurt. While Cronenberg leans more to the macabre and gory than I generally prefer, I have always like Vigo and there is always something appealing about the guy who wants to be at peace but gets dragged back into his violent past by circumstance (John Wick,…
Captain Redux Not so long ago I wrote a piece called Captain America that was about my plans for an upcoming transcontinental ride this summer from Des Moines back to my hillside. Everything about that ride in terms of the reasons for doing it have changed as things do, so I am finding myself in change mode. The sequence went like this: first the testimony I was to give in Des Moines has been pushed…
Forgiveness One of my favorite movies that I happened on scanning Netflix tonight is the 2011 movie Warrior with Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton and Nick Nolte. The reason I am scanning Netflix is because Kim is off rehearsing with her Encore choral group for an early June concert, her first with Encore. Last night we watched three of the four second installments of the AppleTV series called WeCrashed about Adam and Rebekah Neumann, the founders…
Texas Chainsaw Massacre In 1974, almost fifty years ago, Leatherface burst onto the scene of the national pop consciousness as a cannibalistic mass murderer. Our culture loves a horror movie for reasons I can’t relate to (I’m too much of a scaredy-cat to enjoy any form of horror movie) and this particular horror franchise has spawned nine sequels, a video game and even comic books that have made somebody a lot of money off the…