For the second day in a row, I find myself sittting here in the living room of our hilltop with the sun shining brightly on a crisp December morning and the air being so clear that the Pacific Ocean feels to be right at our feet to the west. Just over the rolling hills of Vista that sit between our hilltop and the coast, we can see a full 40 miles of deep blue ocean.…
Twelve Years a Slave refers to both a powerful historical memoir and its acclaimed film adaptation. The memoir itself was written in 1853 by Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York, who was kidnapped in Washington D.C. in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana. He spent 12 years enslaved on plantations before being rescued in 1853. His detailed firsthand account became one of the most important slave narratives, providing unprecedented insight into…
Back in the mid-1960s we were living in Maine while my mother set up and ran the first women’s Job Corps center at the old Poland Spring resort complex. It was quite a change of pace and place for us. Discounting my first 4-5 years as a blur of on and off images, I had spent my life in two places, a tropical valley in Costa Rica and then a grad student subsistence life in…
I no longer know what to say about the state of our nation that I and others have said over and over again, especially during the course of 2025. When I encounter someone with an opposing worldview, a phenomenon we all must live with at what seems like increasing frequency, I understand that it is socially difficult to engage, so I, like so many of us, just shut down and walk away, mumbling something like,…
Like most large families that gather at the holidays, over the years, we have tried every imaginable configuration of gift-giving. Many families go with the “kids only” approach that suggests that adults need not get presents and that Christmas is for children. I’m not sure if we ever tried that, but if we did it either got immediately breached or quickly discarded mostly because Mrs. Claus (a.k.a. Kim) vetoed it based on her passion for…
We recently lost Jeff Grogg to the universe. Jeff was a beloved husband to Lisa, a beloved brother to Kim and Sharon, a beloved uncle to Will, Josh and even a non-Grogg like my son Tom and also a feisty as shit brother-in-law to me. About 30 years ago I stood a few miles from here at Mission San Luis Rey giving my first eulogy. That was for my father and I learned an important…
I feel great. No one has ever accused me of not being expressive, but I am having a hard time not telling the world how great I feel at the moment. I think this falls into the category of being thankful of my blessings, something I am always all about these days. And I know that there will be times and days when I do not feel great, so I like to acknowledge the moments…
There is something about the holidays that make us all want to hunker down around hearth and home. This year, nature is cooperating in that program by delivering what looks to be a four day stretch of foul weather to our hilltop and the surrounding county. That foul weather is starting today and running through Friday, which means it will engulf Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and what the Brits like to call Boxing Day. Kim’s…
All major religious traditions have narratives about moral decline and its consequences. Start by thinking about Christianity. The Bible contains several narratives depicting periods of widespread moral corruption and their consequences. The earliest and most dramatic example occurs in Genesis and describes the pre-flood world as, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” This leads…
Kim and I are both people who did not spend a lot of our lives doing what people call “partying”. That is to say, I don’t drink at all and Kim only drinks a little. We both like music (Kim, obviously, more than me), but we tend to like it in combination with some form of storytelling like musical theater or thematic cabaret. Neither of us is particularly inclined towards rock concerts and what I…