We’re in the middle of a brief stretch in a long year when we pause to count blessings, give thanks and acknowledge our good luck. We are finished with 2025, and look where we are:…
Posts published in “Essays”
Anyone who has been in the Anderson Valley for any length of time is familiar with the Floodgate Store on Highway 128 in Philo. Over the years many businesses established there have had some prepared…
Do we get softer, more sentimental, less intelligent and less able to think clearly as we age? (Asking for a friend.) Actually I’m asking for, or about, my wife. She was once hard-headed, tough-minded and…
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre on London’s Southbank, might seem to make for oddly out-of-season fare. Yet the play itself conjures calendric confusion and climate catastrophe. In the midst…
There are many things I don’t understand. Some are common, like the mystery of airplanes able to heave their loaded bulk high above the clouds, coming down a million miles away with (almost) never a…
The Golden State Warriors invited the seven surviving players from the team that won the NBA championship in 1975 — Charles Dudley, Jamaal Wilkes, Clifford Ray, Rick Barry, George Johnson, Butch Beard and Jeff Mullins…
The Christian church year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, which falls either in late November or early December. Many traditions mark the occasion with festive pomp as befits a New Year celebration: organ…
We enjoyed a glorious Thanksgiving dinner in the tiny but exquisite north coast town of Westport hosted by our friends who are two of only 60 year-round residents. Highway One north to Westport on the…
(Please understand the following information was gleaned by a rockhound, not a geologist, I’m trying to condense millions of years of geology into a few paragraphs.) “Where were we when we saw seashell fossils in…