First stop was the near north woods, Humboldt County USA, to wheedle the medicos into granting me a clean bill of health before I hit the road. A year ago this February, my doctor who…
Posts published in February 2010
Wallen Summers becomes our third guest from the Valley who was born outside the US. He ‘arrived’ in Shanghai, China, in 1932, the second child of Sarci Chen and his American wife, Ann Summers. “My father was a sophisticated, modern guy of the 1920s who had been educated at Worcester Tech in Massachusetts and upon his return to China he became an electrical engineer with his own business. My older sister and I grew up in a middle class household and we were very close. She is a retired psychiatrist in San Francisco who has hung on to her Chinese roots far more than I have. She even changed her name from June back to Mai Long and to this day continues to have very negative feelings towards the Japanese after our experiences in the Second World War, perhaps because she is four years older than me and was a teenager at that time."
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. First an update from the world of higher education. AVHS alum Cassidy Hollinger, currently a freshwoman at the illustrious Vassar College in…
The Tea Party appeals to the swelling numbers of the new former middle class angry at the sudden vanishing of their accustomed perks and entitlements to a predictably comfortable suburban existence. They're mad at the government and hot for “liberty.” But how do they propose to maintain the hyper-complexities of suburban life without taxes to pay for fixing the countless roads their lives depend on or to run the gold-plated central school districts that seem to exist solely to provide Friday night football?
Pitchers and catchers report to spring training this week. There is hope! Baseball is on its way. I would rather watch the Minnesota Twins, but they train across the continent in Florida. Here in Tucson,…
Yesterday I came in from harvesting a storm-felled tan oak, my Neolithic mind thinking ahead to winter warmth from these new-cut logs a year hence, and I found in my email a missive from someone…