Coming of Age Tomorrow is my 69th birthday, which means I will be starting my 70th year. I have never been a person who cares much about age as a defining characteristic. When I hit 30, 40, 50 and even 60 it was a non-event. I’m not so sure that 70 will be any different for me when it comes in a year. I think it’s fair to say that these days, except for the…
Movietime My movie habit began very solidly during high school in Rome, Italy. While growing up in Maine during Junior High School and also during ninth grade at Hebron Academy, I don’t remember caring too much about movies, or even TV for that matter. Those years were heavily dominated by getting into outdoor sports ranging from skiing and canoeing to golfing and tennis. TV and movies were at best an afterthought. That all changed when…
Jambalaya One of the more interesting places in the U.S. is New Orleans. I find it so interesting because it represents the confluence of cultures ranging from the French, who originally owned the area to the Spanish, who controlled the land to the west. The American continent is divided by the mighty Mississippi River and New Orleans is the place where the Mississippi spreads its wings across a large swath of delta as it flows…
Getting Tired We have two cars and I think its fair to say we feel like we need two cars. For short periods of time like when son Thomas was here for a visit, when he needed to borrow one of our cars, we can survive with just one car, especially because I have two two motorcycles in a pinch. Southern California is not New York City. In New York City you can survive on…
Tanks, I Needed That It has been almost a year now since Russia invaded Ukraine in its latest round of aggression against its former significant satellite country to the west. They began their hostilities against Ukraine in the same month (February) in 2014, but the world was in a significantly different place vis-a-vis Russia back then and the global community more or less stood by and let Russia have its way with parts of Ukraine,…
Power Washed Today I am doing something sensible for a change. I have noticed that my two palapas, the one on the deck and the one on the patio, have become somewhat soiled. My normal approach to something like that is to replace the fabric, which is some sort of Sunbrella mesh fabric that lets wind and rain through it to minimize the stress on the material out in the elements. So, I found out…
Last Man Standing I have never been as connected to music as many of my peers. I have only one recollection about popular music from my grade school days in the first half of the 60s. One day, my friends and I were playing baseball on a vacant lot (we actually did that quite a bit since ball fields were for organized little leagues and not for the scruffy sandlot gangs like us). One of…
Still Standing or Standing Still I am constantly in awe of the natural world. There are plenty of times in life when we go about our business of the moment and don’t give our immediate or broader surroundings a moment’s thought. I suppose that is the normal state of affairs for life forms that must struggle to keep the spark of existence alive. The Protozoa does not spend much time contemplating its existence or worrying…
Into the Desert The desert is on my mind today for some reason. I’m sure it has something to do with all the rain that keeps on falling, but I want to go beyond that. I am always more inclined to head east from here than to head west. West means heading towards the throngs of people near the coast. The ocean can be pleasant, but the crowds rarely are. By contrast, if you head…
Scared in the Dark Today in the rain, I got hooked into a movie I had seen and resisted for some time. It’s called Genius and is the storyof Max Perkins, the famous editor at Scribner’s who discovered and published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among others. Jude Law plays Wolfe and he is a desperately troubled figure that has an overactive mind and an out-of-control literary ego that may have helped…