Perspectives of a Lifelong Learner
Monsoon season. I dreaded monsoon season. It came with pounding rain, and I had to drive in it. Since the wiper blades couldn't keep up, everything beyond the windshield just disappeared. White knuckled and eyes peeled, I was just hoping that the next Arizona crossing was not a torrent. The roar of the storm always... Continue Reading →
It has been 20 years since 9-11, our contemporary day of infamy. As if watching a B movie on some vintage cable channel, we witnessed commercial airliners disappear into the glass reflections of New York’s twin towers. Amidst chaos, a smothering wave of  debris, and the successive collapse of the two monoliths, the country attempted... Continue Reading →
1968--Looking back it was a snapshot in time, a bygone era that you would only really know if you had experienced it yourself. Summer had come. It was after my freshman year in college. I had gone right back to my old ways, hanging on the Strip, being exposed to a whole lot more than... Continue Reading →
Come September '64, last year's seniors were nowhere to be found. The standouts, the BMOC’s, the multi-sport four-year varsity lettermen, were gone. So was their cheerleading entourage. Most had beat it out of town three months earlier. Some stayed and even got married. In that year and across the country, they and their 2,145,000 counterparts... Continue Reading →
THE BEFORE YEARS - PART I Some say '63, '64 or even '65. Others think '68. For me, it was '67, the end of adolescence. Commencement was over and we had said our goodbyes. Yearbooks sported both the sincere and the trite, those embarrassing scribbles scanned but not read. Back home, we searched the pages,... Continue Reading →
What a week some ten years ago--The Weather Channel might have described it as the confluence of convergent and divergent air flows, in this case probably hot air colliding. Even with the diligent effort of a more than capable Administrative Assistant, my schedule was put to the test. Â In one week I had to be... Continue Reading →
The Summer of Love It was some two years after. Back then, no one knew about the great getaway, my first solo long-distance road trip. I had convinced myself it was about the music, driving up to the Monterey Pop Festival and all. It was the music, but much more. I was on my own.... Continue Reading →
For me, this article by Jennifer Breheny Wallace really hits home. In 1960 we moved from Colorado to  California. I was eleven.  There still would be a couple more trips riding between Denver and LA on the California Zephyr. Although we lived in Colorado Springs and like my big sister before me, I spent many... Continue Reading →
My god I’m 70. How the hell did that happen? It wasn’t like it snuck up on me. I knew it was coming. But my god, here it is two months after the fact and it finally sunk in. I’m fringing 70. Beyond the obvious, being at the top of the immediate family’s old age food... Continue Reading →
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union,... Continue Reading →
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