The hitchhiker was at the Boonville exit on 101. It was about noon. As I passed her she clasped her hands in mock prayer and shot me desperate eyeballs that pleaded with me to please,…
Posts published in “Essays”
I'm not sure you can say it’s a shock if you know it’s coming, but I had known for a while that Ken Anderson was taking his final lap, and it was still a shock…
Count me as one. I was two, my brother one, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. My brother and I were born in Honolulu, Our paternal grandfather, a Scots immigrant, was…
In December of 2001 my dog Jasper the Wonderdog and I were walking up a street called Slalom, approximately 6,500 feet above sea level in the Sierra, on the outskirts of the town of Truckee.…
Most people couldn't recall a time like it. For months on end in the midwest of 1927, and across much of the country, it rained steadily, sometimes in volumes not before seen. Southern Illinois received…
One sunny San Francisco morning in the 1990s I was sitting in my office trying to decide which pile of papers and journals and telephone messages piled on my desk to tackle first, when the…
I once described my family as “six abrasive oddballs” led by “parents from Neptune and three siblings I never knew. All the kids ignored each other except when tormenting younger ones, while mom and dad…