Exactly one week before Christmas I received a bill in the mail from the Mendocino Coast District Hospital for $2,635.47. Immediately after arriving home from the post office, I called the hospital’s billing department. I spoke at some length to two women who worked there.
Posts published in “Essays”
To me the most boring part of any biography is the beginning. You know, all that stuff about the subject’s childhood and schooling and who his parents were and what they were like and even…
I’m going to meet my friend Tim in Nashville, Tennessee. He’s there on business. It’s as close as he may ever get to Detroit again. We can do geography and history between Nashville and Detroit in a day of driving — about 600 miles.
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.
AMTRAK has handled the black-porter/white-porter issue very deftly. Their logo — or at least the one that appears on the tissue covering the head rest — depicts a porter standing erect in his sharp uniform,…
I was among five people from inland Mendocino County who stayed with elder Dine' (Navajo) families at Black Mesa, an uplands mountain plateau on Navajo/Hopi reservation land in the high, frigid (especially at this time of year) northeastern Arizona desert. This expansive area, roughly sixty miles in diameter, has sustained continuous human occupation for thousands of years.
We are currently in the midst of a local drought that coincides with a state drought that coincides with a regional drought that coincides with the global climate change crisis that more and more scientists believe is now irreversible
Finally sitting in our new home in Sittwe, Myanmar, listening to the many sounds of the evening, monks chanting, students reciting homework and of course the blow-up bouncy castle in our neighbor’s yard blasting bouncy Myanmar hip-hop to attract the kids.