A Voice In The Wilderness Our copy of The Hidden Meadows News was in our mailbox when we got home and it was hard not to notice that Kim’s profile in the local gazette has risen to quite a noticeable level. She and her activities represent 3 out of the 8 pages of editorial coverage in our community and she is pictured 4 times. She was given credit for her “respected” co-leadership of the Garden…
Tear Jerkers I just watched two movies while flying cross-country. The first was on the flight from Norfolk to Atlanta and the second I just finished as we are heading into San Diego. The first one was called Hard Miles with Matthew Modine. It tells the story of a teacher and his four juvenile delinquent students who are taking a therapeutic bicycle trip to the Grand Canyon. The pathos runs thick between the struggles of…
Life’s a Beach The Supreme Court has been very busy as it comes to the end of its term. Most of today’s attention has gone to the decisions regarding the obstruction of justice ruling regarding the January 6 insurrection, and about the overturn of the Chevron case which effectively guts the ability of agencies to operate in the manner in which they have in the past. But there’s always a silver lining and today’s silver…
Mid-Atlantic Madness Neither Kim nor I are big Social media users any more though I do watch Instagram to keep up white the next generation and we all tend to use Snapchat for a family chat group and photo vehicle. We call it Marin Madness and its pretty much restricted to the kids, their spouses and us. I’ve gone so far as to steal that sentiment and call my games area on the property Moonstruck…
The Popeye in Me Why the hell did Popeye ever become so famous? Why did the depression era audiences of the comic strips of King Features become so drawn to a one-eyed sailor during the interregnum of two world wars? I have a far easier time grasping the appeal of Bettle Bailey or Blondie, the other King Features favorites, than I do Popeye. He seems, with his Steamboat Willy-like ensemble of Brutus, Wimpy and Olive…
The Summer Solstice A few days ago we had a quaint reminder of days gone by when life was simple and summers were about listening to music in the park and catching fireflies. Quick, what was your first job as a kid? Some might say mowing a lawn, For me it was caddying at the Poland Spring Golf Course in lovely Poland Spring, Maine. We lived there from January, 1966 until August, 1968. Those years…
The Joint is Jumpin’ Last night Kim sang for the first time with a local Jazz combo at a small and unusual gathering spot very close to where we live. Earlier in the week, out of the blue, a woman from her local Women’s Group, who had all come over to our house for a regular dinner gathering, told her she played keyboards with a small jazz band and would Kim be willing to come…
The Irony of Hunter We have all just heard about the conviction of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. This has been a long saga that really began in the middle of Trump’s presidency. Republicans and Democrats alike were screwing around in Ukraine in between the first assault on that sovereign nation in Crimea by Putin’s Russia in 2014 and their more recent and more widespread incursion into the eastern third of Ukraine in 2022. Yes,…
There But For the Grace I’m at the Syracuse airport waiting for my flight to Atlanta, and after a few hours layover, I’ll board my flight back to San Diego. I remember that when my son Roger complained a little bit about me moving as far away as San Diego, I smartly quipped that the difference between a five hour flight to San Diego and a three hour flight to Florida was not so great…
You Can’t Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe borrowed the phrase “You Can’t Co Home Again” from another author (with permission) so I will do likewise, but with no ability to get permission from the long-since deceased Thomas Wolfe. In fact, his novel with that name was published posthumously in 1940, so there are all sorts of permissioning issues involved right from the get-go. The story is about a writer who has achieved some degree of…