The Tattoo of Life We are all a product of what life has dealt us over the years. Some people wear it on their face with their wrinkles showing the hardships they have endured. Other people show the wear and tear on their souls where it is not as obvious at first, but comes through equally clearly after time spent with them. I think we all know people that have become embittered with age. They…
Evangelical Epiphany We are in Oklahoma City tonight. We’ve just driven 864 miles from Knoxville, Tennessee, across the length of that state, across the Mississippi and then across the girth of Arkansas and into Oklahoma to the midpoint of that state. One of the first things I saw this morning was a 300 foot cross outside a evangelical church in Tennessee. Along the way on Rt. 40, the thing I saw the most (other than…
Educating Our Children I recently saw an old Confucian proverb that goes: If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. I was raised in a household that valued education. My mother had grown up in rural upstate New York in a family where neither the mother nor father had much formal education. They were a…
Ridge Running At 6am we flew our of the City through the Holland Tunnel. After cutting across New Jersey on Rt. 78. That takes us over the Delaware Water Gap into the business part of Eastern Pennsylvania, past the old mill towns of Allentown and Harrisburg. It is there that we connect with Rt. 81 for our ride south. I know Rt. 81, but I usually use it from Scranton to Binghamton for my rides…
Cleaning House In 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 was tragically brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland with 259 souls having their lives cut short by a terrorist bomb. That was a routine daily London to New York flight taken by many of us and used by my bank to transport the daily pouch with “important” interoffice communiques. On that particular day, we not only had our pouch on board, but also one of the officers in…
Taking a Break Due to needing to drive forty-two hours and 2,818 miles in the next four days, I have gotten out ahead of my normal writing tasks by writing five stories and loading them into the blog system for times release daily over the next five days (I am taking the added precaution of loading in one for next Sunday in case I need a recovery day). This is a nice feature of the…
Global Exit It seems that my Global Entry status is up for renewal. I went through the rigmarole of filling out my application online for a renewal and then went through a two-week wait for preliminary approval. I will assume that it did not take two weeks due to any difficulty in clearing me (I am as pure as the driven snow…at least in terms of being a national security risk), but rather because this…
Shock and Yawn I stayed up to watch the Judiciary Committee hearing on Impeachment, which was into its fourteenth hour. It had all become a yawn on both sides of the aisle with Democrats, one-after-another, feeling the need to outline the efforts of Donald Trump to undermine democracy, while the Republicans made their arguments about how there was no evidence of any crime. The one side says the evidence is overwhelming while the other says…
Leaving the Party I’ve never been a big party-goer. I’m not sure why that is. I consider myself a reasonably social person. I don’t drink much, if at all, but I think it would be wrong to attribute this to that. It certainly reinforces my preference to avoid parties, but I felt this way about parties long before I decided I didn’t care for alcohol. I am a morning person, which means late-night is not…
Visiting Hours It is a cold and rainy Saturday morning and I am sitting in an outdoor waiting room that resembles a bus stop shelter. The benches are cold institutional steel and the only thing on them is a scratched-off instant lottery ticket that is testament to the loser lifestyle. There is a small space heater cranking out heat and had it been summer, there is a small window air conditioner to keep things cool.…