Back in the Back Today we started our motorcycle ride through Arizona and New Mexico. I really haven’t ridden much since our ride through NorthernSpain and Portugal last October. That has mostly been a weather-related issue, but there has also Ben some dust in the air around our club membership that I have previously described and have no desire to rehash. This ride was organized by one our Phoenix members, so, naturally, it started and…
Dialing Up the Awesome Several years ago, my friend, Maggie Larsen, sent me a card that I keep in front of me at my desk. On that particular shelf I have things that are meant to remind me about the kind of person I want to be. I have a miniature model motorcycle and scooter to remind me of my greatest passion and its origins way back when with a Lambretta 50cc scooter when I…
Strapping it On In October 1996, I rode my new yellow and black Honda Valkyrie, a monster of a motorcycle, up to Woodstock Vermont to go on a very chilly ride through the fall foliage of New England. I was meeting our good friends Frank and Barbara O’Connell at their place on the Ottauquechee River, called Robinson Farm. It was a notable farm because it has a massive barn that sits on the hillside and…
Reliving My Life I have for a long time prided myself in saying that I have no regrets. That is my way of saying that I feel I have lived a good life and that I have learned form every step I have taken, whether it turned out well for me or badly. I can point to a number of setbacks in my life, but none of them cause me to regret having gone down…
The Shrinking World For most of my life, the world has gotten bigger. My mother took her small Upstate New York perspective in 1946 and globalized herself by going to work for the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela. No trip to Italy for her, she went right out to the deep end of the pool in the mountains of the Orinoco. I inherited that global orientation by being born on the shores of Southern Florida and…
Coming and Going This weekend was all about Kim’s Encore vocal group show. She had performances on both Friday and Saturday nights and each one lasted for 2 hours+. I went to both shows, as is my habit with her performances. The first night we had friends Oswaldo & Gary, Sam & Chris, sister Kathy & Bennett as well as nephew Josh, Haj, JJ and Leila, who drove down from Pasadena. In addition to several…
Living with a BooBoo It’s been two days since I sliced off the top of my thumb with a really sharp Japanese sickle blade and my left thumb has mostly stopped throbbing, but is still very much bandaged up for protection while that nasty wound heals. The good news is that it was a very clean slice that took off a wedge chapped piece of the gardening glove I was wearing and a small piece…
Reparations The 2020 movie called Worth that stars such greats as Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci and Amy Ryan is about the valuing of lives lost in the 9/11 tragedy. It is a fascinating study in how professionals go about putting human lives into dollars and cents and it may be one of the more instructive stories to help us deal with the next great reparations issue, dealing with the compensation for African Americans who’s ancestors…
Charlie Bit My Finger! There was a very cute YouTube video a few years ago with a little boy playing with his infant brother, Charlie. Age one point, Charlie chomps down on the older boy’s finger to the point of sufficient pain to have him howl to his mum that “Charlie bit my finger!” in the best of British accented style. Well, today, I am typing on my iPad with 9 fingers since my left…
GPSing In 1996 I was on one of the first motorcycle rides of what became my motorcycle group called AFMC (American Flyers Motorcycle Club). We were in northern Vermont at Shelburne Farms on Lake Champlain. We had had a very cold October ride through Vermont, warming our hands at every stop, like the Warren Country Store. In fact, it was that ride that convinced me to upgrade to a BMW R1100RT, which has guided my…