Snap Out of It! My son-in-law, John, just sent a Facebook post asking for lines that fans can easily identify with a favorite movie. My favorite movie (determined long ago as such) is Moonstruck. It stars Cher, Nicholas Cage, Danny Aiello, Vincent Gardenia, Olivia Dukakis, and a host of great character actors. My favorite line from the movie (and there are so many noteworthy lines from which to choose) is when Cher slaps Nicholas Cage…
Drinking the Drink If we talk the talk and walk the walk, do we drink the drink? I believe I do. My relationship with alcohol is a strange one. Like most people, my awareness of alcohol significantly predates my consumption of it. Also like most every kid, I snuck a sip or two of beer, wine and even the hard stuff when I was young. I had just enough to know that I didn’t like…
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…
Hip to be Square Huey Lewis is four years older than me but, as it turns out, he did follow an early path very similar to mine. He entered Cornell as an engineering student as Hugh Anthony Cregg III, having gotten an 800 on the SAT math test. That bests my score by fifty points. The rest of his career was quite a bit different from mine, but presumably at the age of 71 now…
New York, Nëw York Tonight we flew into JFK on JetBlue from San Diego. Any way you slice it, that is a full day travel affair. We’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about reengaging with air travel and how we feel about it. While Kim hears all my thoughts on the topic, I don’t want to assume that her thoughts on the subject are the same as mine. I think we all have…
The Extended Self Today I read an interesting article in the Washington Post about people who have to evacuate their homes in an emergency. The theme plays into what seems to be a recurring theme these days, which is about materialism and its impact on our psyches. We start with a typical concentric circle approach to thinking about ourselves. When push comes to shove, like when we are very ill or in the hospital, there…
It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood This neighborhood is physically defined as a small hilltop outcropping that stands between a little valley called Hidden Meadows and the run down to the coast. As I may have mentioned before, there are about forty homes up on this hill on what I would characterize as six roads. There are hill crest homes around the edges and several inner homes that don’t seem to care so much…
The Gang’s Almost All Here Last Saturday, before the in-laws from Georgia and Texas converged on me for our nephew’s nuptial gathering, I had a pre-arranged 50th Reunion Zoom call with my high school class of 1971 from Notre Dame International Preparatory School for Boys, located at the time (it is long since closed down) on the Via Aurelia on the western side of Rome, Italy. NDI, as it was called, was an international school…
See You Around Campus It is the first day of school and I have on a suit and a nice dress shirt (no tie, thank you, for even on Wall Street, ties are very passé and mark you as an anachronism). But I believe this is my second time wearing one of my 15 remaining suits in the past two years. You know the two reasons for that. The first is COVID. I have had…
Taming the Hillside This week I am coming to the end of a progression of man versus nature. I don’t like to think that I have triumphed over nature because that would be a foolish perspective. Nature always wins in the end. It would also be foolish because this effort is all about finding ways to embrace nature and revel in it. But I cannot completely avoid feeling like I have wrestled some aspects of…