Letting Go We got back to the hilltop today. The continental winds were with us today and we made it to San Diego about forty minutes earlier than expected. All of that meant that even with checked baggage, we made it home before noon with some Taco Bell in tow for good measure. This was, by any measure, a short absence from the hilltop. The last time we left this summer by car, we returned…
Getting Started in a Ford And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson. For some reason, Kim put The Graduate on TV tonight. It has been a while since we’ve seen the movie, but some things always stick with you. In the case of The Graduate, the memorable runs to everything from the dialogue to the music. The music in this most famous Mike Nichols classic from 1967 was, of course, the dulcet tones of Simon &…
Buying a Stairway to Heaven If everything good happened fifty years ago, then everything bad took us back a step twenty years ago. Fifty years ago, when I was but a pup heading to start college at Cornell, I would have gotten a D on my Rock n’ Roll report card. I was liking things like Elton John and Bread with some Jim Croce and Cat Stevens thrown in to balance the rough and tumble…
Making Gummies I’m feeling very tired for some reason. Thanks to my CPAP machine, the first data point I get each morning is how many hours of sleep I have gotten overnight and the ancillary issues of any sleep interruptions or mask removals. I rarely, if ever, have a problem with the latter, but I keep a close eye on the hours of sleep. I am convinced that one of the basic non-rocket-science concepts of…
The Burden of Expectations You have often heard people describe how they are too hard on people because they demand a lot of themselves and find that they should do likewise for others. That is a smallish dilemma when it comes to managerial oversight because one can set objective standards and allow people to perform against them such that you can always define the parameters of success based on how the universe you are trying…
The Kindness of Strangers Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and after a successful Broadway run with Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter, it was turned into a critically acclaimed film in 1951. While the film retained Brando and Hunter as Stanley and Stella Kowalski, it replaced the Toni-winning Tandy with Vivien Leigh. Leigh had won an Oscar for best actress for Gone With the Wind in 1939, and sure enough,…
Air in the New Normal Thirty years ago when I used to travel to Mexico City on business, I can remember the difference between the normal days and the days when the air miraculously cleared and you would see the lovely distant mountains that surround the D.F. (As it is called). I don’t know the percentages of normal smoggy days and crisp, clear, high-visibility days, but I bet there were not more than one in…
Best of Friends Today is a funny day for me. It’s funny for several reasons and business-as-usual for other reasons. The day was scheduled to be about waking up to breakfast with our friends Gary & Oswaldo, who came down for a visit from L.A. yesterday and stayed overnight, followed by attending an orientation event at University of San Diego for new teaching faculty and then heading up the coast to Dana Point for an…
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…