Sisters In my list of top five holiday movies is White Christmas with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen. Words almost can’t describe how evocative of the holiday season I find that movie. Perhaps it is because it was made in 1954, the year of my birth. Maybe the latent New Englander in me likes the setting in a quintessential Vermont inn waiting desperately for snow to make its Christmas season prosperous. I’ve…
Ringing in the New We are in the home stretch of the modern world’s annus horribilis. While we will soon be at the start of another year that will undoubtedly begin as badly as this one will end, we are all hopeful that over the course of the twelve months of its duration, 2021 will somehow work its way out of this malaise and resolve itself into a fine year. For that to be the…
Sweet December There is a Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves movie, made twenty years ago called Sweet November, a remake of and even older movie of the same name. It is a strange love story about a straight-laced man and an iconoclastic woman, who meet through a chance encounter at the DMV and decide to spend the calendar month of November together. The whole point of the story is the randomness of life and why…
Mission Impossible When I was growing up, there were several shows that I especially liked because my mother liked them as well. There was that early courtroom show, The Defenders. I once asked mom why she didn’t like Perry Mason and she said she just couldn’t get into Raymond Burr for some reason. She liked Gunsmoke because she knew James Arness from her days in Pacific Palisades and she thought he was a handsome and…
Occupying the Suitcase We are on our first road trip (or any trip for that matter) since July. That was four months ago. For years during my active working life, I had a private view that it was important to plan some sort of getaway every two months. Of course, that was in addition to weekends in Ithaca, business trips to here or there and nights out. I mean I would plan something “special” to…
Nothing But Blue Skies This crazy sun keeps me guessing. I’ve lived here now full-time for ten months and I am still amazed when I go to different parts of my property how the sun is in places where I don’t expect it. Part of that is about me and my orienteering capabilities while on my property and part of it is about the full range of motion that the sun (I guess I should…
Wildlife I have written stories about many different types of critters this year, some real and some imagined (since I cannot swear what caused this noise or that). This morning while showering, I glanced out the smallish etched-glass windows in the shower and saw that a large hawk was sitting in the branches of the seed pod tree of the Agave Americana that had sprung up over this year. That “tree” is about forty feet…
One Million Words I just read Kim my latest story about TeslaLand and it led to me reading my story titles from the past sixty days or so. That led me to look at my blog statistics, where I noticed that I am up to 784 stories posted since I began the blog in February, 2019. When I went up to Sonoma last year to visit some friends, we went to the Jack London homestead,…
Wandering Through The Desert I usually take the ride out through the ranch country of San Diego County, through the Anza Borrego Desert, on my motorcycle. The 74-mile ride is a good day in the saddle. But today I made the trip in the car with Kim and Betty since we were being followed by our Sonoma friends who had never been to this particular desert oasis. In the Spring, the super-bloom of the desert can…
A Mitzvah For Mary Growing up in Latin America and then Wisconsin did not give me much opportunity to meet Jewish people. Strangely enough, my first Jewish friend was Michael Feldman, who I met when we moved to Poland Spring, Maine. South-Central Maine is more like Appalachia than the typical postcard of Bar Harbor. Michael was there because his grandfather Saul owned the Poland Spring Resort, one of the oldest resorts in America, dating back…