Back in the dark ages of my youth, and I don’t mean to say that it was a dark time— quite the contrary, it was rather brightly illuminated; I was making a hyperbolic statement to…
Posts published in “Essays”
“What’s a Limb Cast?” Any geologist or rockhound can tell you. If you bury any or all of a tree in hot volcanic ash the wood will burn away but leave a cast, or impression,…
When my friends ask librarians to recommend a novel by a local author that’s set in Sonoma County they suggest Greg Sarris’s Watermelon Nights and Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon. They rarely if ever point readers in…
I highly recommend that you read the well-written, very easy-to-understand Grand Jury Report titled, “Who Runs Mendocino County?” It’s a point-on discussion regarding the governing dynamic between and among the Board of Supervisors and the…
I’ve been feeling lately as if I should be (or should have been) evolving. Not in the literal sense, although some kind of spontaneous flash mutation like growing gills or supernumerary phalanges or toxin-secreting glands…
A February night in 1924, in a Manhattan concert hall owned by the Aeolian piano company… the wailing, warped, and flatted clarinet glissando that opens George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue announced the 20th century’s self-recognition…
From 1968 to 1973 I was Executive Assistant to Cesar Chavez charged with computerizing the United Farm Workers Union. Starting in Delano, we soon moved the Union headquarters to Keene, California, located in the hills…
Twenty years ago, in our rural subdivision south of Laytonville, a man bought three parcels from the same Los Angeles heiress who also sold us our land. Dave, as I’ll call our neighbor, didn’t live…
In 1988, gas was 90¢ a gallon, Ronald Reagan was president, a prototype of the B-2 stealth bomber was revealed, Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis as their party’s presidential candidate, Republicans nominated Vice President George H.W.…