We’re only a year removed from Matt Cain’s perfect game. Certainly legions of Giants fans would say this was the finest performance ever by a major league pitcher. Older aficionados with a sense of the…
Posts published in “Essays”
Last week the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a story titled, “Winegrowers facing labor hurdles as harvest season approaches.” The story began, “Grape growers and farmers throughout the state are facing a range of challenges…
There is one supreme and universal law of human relations in all its manifestations, social, political, economic, cultural: people create no end of mischief in the hours when they are not sleeping. Any vision of…
Fifty-five years ago the Giants moved from New York to San Francisco. I was four years old and occasionally hid in our large clothes hamper to pray for Willie Mays to hit a home run.…
Continued from last week’s AVA, the Congressional hearing at which marijuana prohibition was debated. The witness, Dr. William Woodward of the American Medical Association, expressed opposition to the pending bill. He was relentlessly attacked by…
She could be seen nearly any day of the week, sitting on the the sidewalk outside the market or liquor store. She would usually have her cats with her, crowded into a pet box. She wore several layers of clothing which she got from the free box, topped off by a floppy hat made of white cotton eyelet. Her name was Nellie.
On several occasions during the summer when I was twelve-years-old, I felt certain I was on the verge of understanding how everything fit together, and I do mean everything. I would find myself sitting or standing very still and feeling all the countless separate parts of reality coalescing and clicking together; and with every passing moment I would become more and more excited as the myriad fragments fell into place in relation to each other and in relation to the entirety of everything else.
The rolling storm that is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring thundered through its hundredth anniversary last Wednesday, the 29th of May. I spent most of the day at 39,000 feet, high above global festivities that included…
Ask almost anyone, anywhere in the world, about a place they’d like to visit, and chances are “Paris” will come up sooner rather than later. (Full disclosure: Please do not assume that the author of…