I spent several summers on my grandfather’s berry farm in the Skagit Valley sixty miles north of Seattle. To irrigate his water-hungry crops, he had drilled a well in the 1950s. The water was conducted…
Posts published in “Essays”
While I have written extensively about local history in Mendocino County there is another kind of history I enjoy delving into. Call it culinary history. I enjoy delving into what we eat, how we prepare…
Eons ago, in something like the mid-to-late 1990s, there was a period where there was no official place to get a hot dinner out in our little coastal Marin town. The local cafe hadn’t opened…
One drizzly afternoon last week I sat around his dining room table with Donald Pardini and son Ernie and listened to Don’s recollections of his early childhood in post-milltown Navarro. What stories and what power…
Even in his own obituary, John Jenrette had to yield the spotlight to lovely Rita, his devoted wife from long ago. The Times’ account began, “John Jenrette Jr., a charismatic Democratic Representative from South Carolina who…
Absent much of the past couple years, I too late realized I’d never taken full advantage of employment opportunities while in Mendocino County. The mistake was trying to fit my squaresville employment existence into the…
On a leafy street in a leafy village on leafy Long island there was a local volunteer firefighter’s firehouse, as orderly as the military. Us kids knew some of the volunteers from our neighborhood. We’d…
Johann Sebastian Bach’s birthday, March 21st, falls on the first full day of spring, if one calculates that date by mercilessly quartering the calendar. The chronological coincidence is a fitting one: though Vivaldi gets all…
I hadn’t ever heard “feedback,” in a musical sense, before, but the howling that kick-started the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ was an instant hit with me. This was long ago. You needed to snap molded…