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…
Fear of Flying In 1973, in the middle of my college years, Erica Jong wrote a groundbreaking novel about a professional woman who wanted to not be pigeonholed by male-dominated standards and especially wanted to be free to explore and express her own version of female sexuality. All I really remember about the book from the reading Fear of Flying as I did when we were all reading that sort of thing, was something she…
A Confederacy of Southerners This is a party weekend at Casa Moonstruck. Kim’s nephew Will is marrying Ashley in early October. They got engaged on our family trip to Ireland two years ago on a lonely beach on the Ring of Kerry. It was cause for celebration since Will is a sweet guy and Ashley is someone the whole family likes and feels is a fine match for Will. WIll is 42 and Ashley is…
Air in the New Normal Thirty years ago when I used to travel to Mexico City on business, I can remember the difference between the normal days and the days when the air miraculously cleared and you would see the lovely distant mountains that surround the D.F. (As it is called). I don’t know the percentages of normal smoggy days and crisp, clear, high-visibility days, but I bet there were not more than one in…