“Yes,” someone even casually acquainted with me might say, “sometimes you do. And sometimes you go through life with a shamrock-festooned horseshoe hovering over your head like a protective halo, allowing you to continue drawing…
Posts published in “Essays”
The season has changed, if reluctantly. Time to put the storm windows on the old clapbord house, tune the grand piano and take out a volume of 18th-century duets off the nearby music shelf. And…
My neighborhood is like most in Marin, suburban-sedate, a combination of young families, working people, the elderly which, of course, includes me and my wife of sixty-two years. Architecturally, we live in a mix of…
When’s the last time you asked someone for directions? And by someone I mean a live person, another human being you talked to face-to-face — something I call “Old School GPS.” While you’re trying to…
Once upon a time I was an international drug smuggler. But please let me explain. One foggy afternoon in the late 1980s I was sitting in the dungeon-like old medical library at UCSF medical center,…
On Wednesday evening, October 2nd, I attended the Ukiah City Council’s regular meeting to speak in support of the council passing a resolution to support State Proposition 36. I made a comment, urging the council…
Hurricane Helene came a-knocking last week, then spent most of her time knocking down trees and power poles. I got off easy with lashing winds and walls of water that hardly lasted an hour. Cleaning…
Join me in a tankard-raising toast to today’s release of my colorful new album, Handel’s Organ Banquet! Hailed along with his contemporary J. S. Bach as the greatest organist of his age, Handel left behind…