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…
Posts published in “Essays”
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…
Olompali, translated from the Miwok as “southern people” or “southern village,” lies just north of Novato, directly off Highway 101. It’s a state park these days but goes way back as the site of a…
Boonville’s first-wave hippies called a meeting one Sunday afternoon to discuss what to do about a loose knit, perhaps mythical, Boonville vigilante crew calling itself Cold Steel, whose stated purpose, if you could find it,…
It was referred to as the cellar, never called a “basement,” though I’m not sure yet I understand what distinguishes them. You could get down there either by the steep stairs leading from the pantry,…
If you’ve got the urge to helicopter out of your rural life for a day, head to Berkeley for a good dose of urban interest. Twenty years ago I lived in Berkeley for 20 years…
When we saw polar bears skateboarding down the big hill on North Dora Street we knew we were back in time for another glorious spring in Ukiah. So nice to see the snow and holiday…