Getting Big Enough Ever since I can remember, for at least the last sixty years, I have lived with the reality that I am too big. The relative measure that causes me to say that has nothing to do with life insurance charts that define healthiness based on a height/weight ratio or a BMI (Body Mass Index). I long ago decided that I fall outside those standards and that they just don’t apply to me…
The Buffalo of My Soul By now we all know that the proper name for what we all grew up knowing as a buffalo, is bison. Technically they are Bison Bison in scientific terms and are a subclass of Bovinae or large, even-toed ungulates (hoofed creatures) that are native to the Great Plains of North America. We all know Tatonka (the non-specific Native American word for the buffalo) from Dances With Wolves fame, and know…
Snow Where to Go Today I got spanked by a loyal member of my motorcycle club. This is a group I founded twenty-five years ago. In fact, this past year I authored a 440-page tome titled The Ride is All about the twenty-five years of riding together all over the world. There is an entire chapter up front about all the characters that make up the club. I’m not sure we are any more or…
Working Stiff I have a strange feeling that 2020 was a buffer year for me, not so much by design, but by happenstance. After many years (I mark them as starting in 1966 at the age of twelve…so call it fifty-five years), the inertia of work has set in. People talk about “failing retirement” as a cute tongue-in-cheek way of bragging that they are so busy in retirement or see such a demand for their…
Experiencing the Holidays My youngest son, Thomas, gave us two experiential gifts this year. One of the bright people at Airbnb came up with a revenue filler called Airbnb Experiences and he and his significant other, Jenna, thought it would be a good gift for us. One was the about learning to be Polish, done by a lovely woman from Krakow who is an underemployed tour guide. The other, which we did last night, was…
Weather Station Echo Charlie Alpha Back in January, 1966 we moved from Middleton, Wisconsin to Poland Spring, Maine. The names alone tell you a lot about that transition. Middleton can’t help but sound pretty ordinary. Wisconsin is the Dairy State, where Maine is Vacationland. One doesn’t allow you to buy margarine rather than good ole butter within its boundaries and the other has so many French Canadians in it that one car dealership used the…
Elevating the Lowly Bison My Bison Boulder outdoor sculpture has now been sitting out on the Western hillside for a week. Yesterday’s strong and somewhat violent rainstorm brought with it an almost instantaneous golden patina to the sheet metal “fur” of the bison head, hoof and tail. I knew it would rust to a dark brown in a few months, but it is interesting to see the rapid onset of the oxidation from the rain.…
Circling the Wagons We all know this has been a strange holiday season but for us it got even more strange. We have known for nine months now that we are not in any way immune to COVID or the virus finding us on our hilltop. That wishful thinking evaporated in March when our nearest neighbor (a man we did not know) died suddenly of heart failure a week after his mother’s family funeral. He…
Ars Gratia Artis When I was in High School at Notre Dame International Prep for Boys in Rome, Italy we had a rotating roster of Brothers of the Holy Cross (the Catholic order founded in France in 1837, but made famous through the founding of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana in 1841). Being a long-ago lapsed Catholic (lapsed when I was four-years-old, strangely because while in a tropical valley in Costa Rica we…
The Night Before COVID Christmas I thought about writing a Christmas poem this year as a traditional retake of the Clement Clarke Moore classic and then Apple News and The Atlantic intervened. At this point in the news cycle, I am starting my day by reading many news summaries. I read them in the sequence in which they come in since I am somewhat dogmatic about reading my emails in chronological order. There is probably…