Recently, there was a reunion of my high school class, a recurrent traditional all-American event I'd always ignored, but for whatever reasons the peer pressure to attend this time came on strong and at the last minute, against my intuition and convictions, I succumbed, bought a plane ticket south, and went. I half-expected frightening reminders of collective aging, puerile nostalgia, embarrassing alcohol-enabled displays of long-repressed urges, ego-fueled career one-upsmanship, excruciating "sharing" of family pictures, and a general outburst of collective regret and confusion.
Posts published in “Essays”
The Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show 2014 has come and gone. As always I went all three days and what a pageant and procession…
Madison Bumgarner, the Giants’ formidable leftie known as Mad Bum or simply Bum, stands tall atop the mound on a cool Friday night in September—the…
I grew up near Cleveland, Ohio in Seven Hills and received my Journalism Degree from Bowling Green University in Ohio, worked for the Plain Dealer as a reporter, but didn’t want to live in Cleveland, so I moved out here during the seventies and worked at the Santa Rosa New Herald, a weekly now gone… then the Cloverdale Reveille, which is still around… then the Mendocino Grapevine which some people remember.
My nieces were working in the city at the time, close by. I checked with my brother, everyone was okay. But the rest of those…
The first home match of the year took place last Wednesday (Sep.3) when the Panthers hosted Middletown in a non-league game. This has been a fairly comfortable game for AV in recent times but, under a new head coach, the visitors were a different proposition this time and despite dominating the first half and creating several good chances, AV were held by the battling Middletown team to just one goal by half-time.
Last week’s 6.0 earthquake epicentered in California’s Napa Valley was taken by a few evangelical types as a warning sign from God against the endemic…
Angel Pagan, the switch-hitting leadoff batter for the Giants, one of the swiftest outfielders in the game, takes a short lead off first base and…
The first 25-30 years of logging near the Mendocino Coast was accomplished by men with axes, chopping down huge old growth redwoods that stood very close to our coastal streams. The logs were rolled, often with jackscrews, into the rivers then floated down to holding areas called booms and on to the sawmills located at or near the mouths of the rivers. The first sawmill on the Albion started operations in 1852 more or less at the same time as on Big River. By 1856 Alexander Macpherson had sawmills operating on both the Albion and Noyo Rivers.
I grew up in Santa Cruz. My dad was in mid-level management at a disk manufacturer in Scotts Valley. We lived in a suburban neighborhood that was fortunately across the road from Henry Cowell Redwood State Park near Felton, which I really treasure. Most everything I understand about our relationship with ecosystems I learned from the redwood forest. My mom was a stay-at-home mom for a big part of my child, an incredibly sharp, intelligent person who went back to school when she was in her 40s and got an advanced math degree. Now she’s a community college instructor. So I had a caring and intellectually-oriented mom who had a big influence on me.
I'm going through the motions of my second jury trial on the same case. I have been held guilty until proven innocent for my entire case so far and I have lost everything that is anything to me in this world. I've lost my fiance because I couldn't be there to run our business and to take care of her and our bills while her hand healed. I lost my children to CPS over this accident. I've lost my home and my business. I sold my Harley for an attorney for my former fiancé so she could fight and get her children back. I have lost my freedom because some district attorney wants to believe what he thinks is right when the truth has been testified to over and over again by my former fiancé, my fiance's eight-year-old son, and myself.