Sunday School I was baptized Catholic because my mother was raised Catholic and because we were living in Venezuela at the time (my father was Venezuelan and my mother worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela). But after my parents were divorced (yes, they were both Catholic and yes, they were both technically excommunicated for that) and the next thing you know we were in Costa Rica without my father. The thing about Costa Rica…
The Other Side of the Mountain You’re wondering where you remember that turn of phrase from. It was the title of a movie in 1975 about an Olympic hopeful skier (Jill Kinmont) that gets paralyzed in 1955 and has to put her life back together afterwards. The title implies that we spend a lot of time pondering the mountains we seek to climb, but often climbing down off the mountain is actually much harder and…
Pretending About the Future Once I had finished renovating the garage and building the side Bonsai Garden, I needed a new project. If you think its optional you don’t understand the nature of retirement. The key lessons of retirement are the subject of many old jokes and include never passing up a bathroom and never trusting a fart. But there is really only one lesson and that is to always stay occupied. A body in…
On The Road Again My friend Steve has just compiled a list of his top 100 motorcycling songs. Willie’s great ballad only made it to #42. I suppose that is because it wasn’t written specifically for the riding as much as for the playing, that is, making music with his friends. But I’ve always liked the theme of the song, which celebrates hitting the road rather than bemoaning it like Leavin’ on a Jet Plane…
Pause and Reflect It’s Saturday morning and I am finally back in the hot tub after what seems like a month of toing and froing. What a hard life, right? Not so much hard, but life is certainly more challenging than normal for everyone and that means that pausing and reflecting is an even better thing now than normal. What exactly is so challenging? Let’s start with a family review. To begin with, as Mark…
Otomi on My Mind Kim can’t speak a lick of Spanish and her pronunciation is worse. And here we are, living in an Hispanic culture where almost 90% of the people who come to the house to work on things for us, from the house cleaners to the gardeners are Mexican. Handy Brad is from the Pennsylvanian part of México, but most of the rest are from the Altiplano or Mexican Plateau. This is where…
Betty Boop Today Kim and I picked up a twelve-year-old white resume stray that Kim has chosen to call Betty. Cecil passed away six weeks ago and Kim has decided that she wants to dedicate her dog affections to aged dogs that have no home. Everyone who knows Kim knows that she has a lot of love to give and dogs are a favorite object for her. There is only so much that humming birds…
It’s a Dog’s World Yesterday Kim told me she is ready to get a new dog and she wants to find a senior dog to adopt. Her reasoning is that she will never replace Cecil in her heart, but she wants to improve the life of a aged dog in its declining years. She seems aware and prepared to accept that she will have some heartache over the possibility of another pet dying, but she…
The Life I Choose and Live Some movies never get old, and that is the case with almost anything with Martin Sheen. I know I have spoken about his son Emilio Estevez’s great movie The Way about the Camino de Compostela. It resonates with me now more than usual because this month we were supposed to be flying off to Barcelona with my ragged band of motorcycle pals. We were planning to drive north through…
Homeward Boundaries It’s sunset here at Casa Moonstruck, one of the loveliest times of day with the sun setting out over the Hills of Fallbrook and the Pacific Ocean. A few weeks ago I decided to note that about a month after the summer solstice, the sun set just north of the right hand hill of the three hills I face in that direction (note to self – figure out if there are names…