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 it was. Although the fair is very much the same…
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 famous San Francisco fog not yet manifest, a soft breeze…
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 in the Towers and those coming to their aid… I…
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 decadence of wine country, not only a condemnation of the…