The House in the Clouds Twenty-six years ago, Keanu reeves made a little movie that didn’t get much attention, only scores a 6.7 on the IMDB index and co-starred Anthony Quinn and Giancarlo Giannini. It was Alfonso Arau’s (the guy who made Like Water for Chocolate and Three Amigos) A Walk in the Clouds. It tells the story of a man who meets a woman in need after he returns from WWII. She is part…
Back on the Chain Gang The house has cleared out of the holiday visitors and tomorrow is the start of the last week of the year for 2021. New Years Day will be next Saturday and my agenda consists of one massage on Wednesday and that’s it. We don’t leave for Florida until the end of the following week, so there isn’t even much to prepare for just yet. My last semester course ended, has…
Workin’ At The Carwash Blues In 1974, while I was working at the Cornell Plantations for the summer, doing 12-hour shifts (7am – 7pm) before running off to a little league practice for the team of seven-year-olds I was coaching, and before picking up my summer-fling girlfriend, Margaret, from her job at the nursing home at 11pm and getting to bed or not, whenever, I would listen to Jim Croce sing his latest hit. While…
Looking Forward I am feeling pensive this morning as I wait for a business call with my expert witness partners in an hour from now. I spend way too much time thinking about life these days and am always trying to take away lessons to live by in the process. I am certain that this is about being in and adjusting to retirement. When I was working full-time I used to take time to write,…
The End of Family Gardening American roots run deep in the family farm. The development of the nation from its original thirteen colonies after their war of independence through the ensuing nineteenth century of westward discovery, settlement and expansion, pretty much took the same path with one territory after another becoming a product of the family farm. The term “family farm” is most often applied to an intergenerational wealth transfer protocol that allows for the…
Florida Calling My kids all love theme parks and especially so Disney World and Disneyland. I have many stories from their youth to depict this passion for a fun day of rides, lines and mediocre food, but none quite reaches up to the heights of my daughter’s honeymoon. As the dutiful father of the bride, I gave them two weeks in Tahiti, thinking that would be an ideal spot post-nuptial. I should have remembered that…
Freight Forwarding We are in the week after Thanksgiving and it feels, as always, like we are wrapping things up for the year. We are having a few final things done at the house (replacing the flooring in the MBR and Guest Rooms), we are planning our last two trips (one to Joshua Tree for Joshua’s 40th birthday, and the other to NYC to see the kids), Kim is wrapping presents at her wrapping center…
Hazy and Lazy I make no apologies for it. I have had a lazy streak in me my whole life. I tend to think it is caused by my not inconsiderable bulk and Newton’s First Law of Motion that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. And the bigger the body, the more energy it takes to keep it in motion and once…
Kneeding Comfort When my kids were younger they fell into two categories. Carolyn and Thomas were forever rambunctiously scraping their knees and existing in a somewhat constant state of scabbed kneecaps from their falling. Roger, on the other knee, was s different sort of child. He was the child that at the age of one crawled to edge of the blanket on the lawn, touched the wet grass and recoiled back to the safety of…
Aging Gracefully Dylan Thomas told us to not go gently into that good night, that old age should burn and rave at close of day, and we should rage, rage against the dying of the light. I think of that poem often and remind everyone that Thomas lasted all of thirty-nine years. The stories of his death comport well with his thoughts of raving and raging at the end. He literally drank his way into…