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Posts published by “Jake Rohrer”

Serenade

I know the venue and I know the crowd; I’ve played this house before. They anticipate my arrival and I sense a change in the…

A Banquet of Abundance

A Year in Review: Makahiki / Arrival / Farewell to Max / Working on a Building / Hilo and Kehena / Ed's Party / The Search…

Love In the Time of Covid

It is the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Laurie and I are sheltering in place at our home, Ulu Loa, in upcountry Maui. The name was…

Anatomy of a Beating

From early 1987 and for about the next 10 years I was employed at a small law office in downtown Oakland. The office consisted of…

Few Comforts For Old Men, A Travelogue

I call it a pilgrimage, a journey that includes destinations and people I very much look forward to seeing and being with. Tempering somewhat my…

Living in the Land of Lono

The rain moves in ghostly horizontal sheets that march out of step across the landscape. Propelled by tradewinds gusting at 40 mph, curtains of water…

Tropical Romance (A Fable)

The scream echoed through the house like a fire alarm and caused the paniolo (Hawaiian  cowboy) to bolt from his seated comfort in the anteroom.…

Two-Dollar Duck

I suppose two dollars is a reasonable assessment of value for a 20-year old plastic duck decoy, a fair price to pay, I think, at…

The Boys From El Cerrity (Part 2)

We arrived in Stockton in my car of the moment, a '58 Plymouth Fury, a cool car in its day, a sporty two-door hardtop with outsized Cadillac-style rear fins. It had two big 4-barrel carburetors sitting opposite each other on a ram-induction fuel system feeding a huge “hemi” V-8 engine and a speedometer that registered up to 160 miles per hour.

The Boys From El Cerrity

High school hit me right between the eyes. Where does a freshman fit in? At the bottom of the ladder, of course. Within a student body of well over a thousand individuals, I ran smack into a social class mentality that seemed to pervade the entire experience, the elite spending their time looking down their noses at those beneath them, each class assuming a position of authority over the underclasses.

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