We can and do empathize with those who for circumstances unexplained and perhaps inexplicable, toil at tasks that cannot be accomplished. A man spending his days, years and lifetime pushing a boulder up a steep…
Posts published in “Essays”
My sorta friend, White Man, was ecstatic at San Francisco’s growing Asian population. Chuckling in anticipation of a Tiananmen-like purge of the hundreds of metropolitan irritations besieging him, White Man would say, “When the Chinese…
“Yes,” someone even casually acquainted with me might say, “sometimes you do. And sometimes you go through life with a shamrock-festooned horseshoe hovering over your head like a protective halo, allowing you to continue drawing…
The season has changed, if reluctantly. Time to put the storm windows on the old clapbord house, tune the grand piano and take out a volume of 18th-century duets off the nearby music shelf. And…
My neighborhood is like most in Marin, suburban-sedate, a combination of young families, working people, the elderly which, of course, includes me and my wife of sixty-two years. Architecturally, we live in a mix of…
When’s the last time you asked someone for directions? And by someone I mean a live person, another human being you talked to face-to-face — something I call “Old School GPS.” While you’re trying to…
Once upon a time I was an international drug smuggler. But please let me explain. One foggy afternoon in the late 1980s I was sitting in the dungeon-like old medical library at UCSF medical center,…