Sweeping the Garage I have used the analogy of sweeping the garage for many years. It is my way of saying that every life needs to include some trivial tasks, not because they cannot always be avoided, but because doing basic tasks is good for the soul. This is somewhat about reminding ourselves that being of service and not vending every aspect of our lives, even when we have the means to do so, is…
Footballing It’s Super Bowl Sunday and in nine hours the LIV (54th) game will be played between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The 49ers have won five Super Bowls, the latest being twenty-six years ago in the days of Joe Montana.and Steve Young. By contrast, the Chiefs were last in the Super Bowl fifty years ago for game IV. That was actually the first year the game was formally called the…
Empty Spaces Today I am sitting in my office overlooking New York Harbor for the last time. Next we will all crowd into a space one-third this size on the darker, less impressive side of our floor. This is space we had previously relegated to storage and spare offices and the occasional outcast who needed temporary office space. Now it will be home to our little venture. Truth be told, it is more like…
Riding on the City of New Ordeals I can’t help myself. I am a child of the sixties and Arlo Guthrie is never far from my consciousness. Consider yourself lucky that I am not ready to give you my rendition of the Alice’s Restaurant Massacree in four part harmony as Arlo would say. My pal Arthur “Living Legend” Einstein, a founding member of my motorcycle gang knows Arlo well enough to have sold him his…
Word As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am working on and have now mostly finished a book on the twenty-five years of motorcycling I have done with my group, called American Flyers Motorcycle Club (AFMC). It is quite the magnum opus with 374 pages, 104,000 words 183 photographs or images and one long chart of our 60 rides over those years. I am writing this for my fellow members and me as a…
Kublai Khan and Citizen Kane I’ve had quite a weekend. One day was totally dedicated to my kids and grandkids. They wanted to check out the American Dream, which is the newest metro-area attraction brought to you by the people who brought the Mall of America to Minnesota. That’s a family called the Ghermezian’s, and they bought the old Xanadu project that got mothballed in the 90’s. Xanadu was intended to parlay a location near…
Compiling Life In May we have the Silver Anniversary Ride of my motorcycle club. I founded the group with four others and we have had about sixty rides over those twenty-five years. Not everyone has made every ride, and members have come and gone, but there is a core group that still rides and a few others that no longer ride, but like to gather with us nonetheless. By my count we have had 80…
Let’s Get Physical With the move to San Diego there are many tasks and transitions needed to make everything flow smoothly. Kim and I have the good fortune to be in good health. I am in surprisingly good health given my size and my ongoing lifestyle choices. My family and I joke about how 23&Me designates me as being predisposed to be a performance athlete. I care little about that, but I certainly do prefer…
Il Brigante My son Thomas and I had dinner tonight at a favorite restaurant that was nearby the condo I owned and lived in for ten years. That was from when Thomas was nine until nineteen years old. It was the home he spent time with me from when he was in fourth grade at Little Red until he was a freshman at Big Red. Compare that to my older children. My oldest never lived…
The Dolomites In 1969 I was living in Rome, Italy and there were only a few things I was about. Everyone went to school so while I was a good student there was nothing very differentiating about that. I had a diplomatic card, but enough other kids had parents either at the embassies or the UN agencies, that that wasn’t so different. And about all that was good for was avoiding traffic tickets (despite parental…