"Solvitur ambulando, St. Jerome was fond of saying. To solve a problem, walk around.” — Gregory McNamee After a severely stressful year of extreme physical challenges finally resolved by two successful surgeries, I am once…
Posts tagged as “essays”
One hundred seven years ago this spring, my oldest uncle, Jack Macdonald (then 18), woke in the house he’d grown up in here at the family ranch. He ate his breakfast hours before dawn, packed…
My uncle David Walton died in China on March 8 at the ripe old age of eighty-seven, just a week ago as I write this, yet I have already received an email with photographs from…
I read Bruce Patterson’s recent letter to the AVA with interest, particularly his reference to the possibility of Mendocino Redwood Company turning one of their stagnant mill sites into a biomass fueled power plant. MRC…
It was in early adolescence that I first began to feel as if I were disappearing — actually discorporating. At times I felt insubstantial, airy. I thought I could feel wind blowing through me. My…
The dog that wouldn’t die and the dog story that won’t quit — that’s what is currently bedeviling the Fort Bragg Police Department. The good news: a long time flophouse/drug house has been cleaned up…
As I peruse the many articles decrying the ruination of towns and independent businesses by big box stores such as Walmart, and I read about Ukiah groveling at the feet of Costco and wasting millions of precious dollars to bring that destructive horror show to town, I recall that the largest assault on the remarkably diverse and egalitarian America of the 1960’s (egalitarian compared to America in 2013) was the construction of the Interstate Highway System
It was fitting that Rafael Puyana, the Colombian harpsichordist who died on March 1st in Paris at the age of 81, should have made his debut — on piano — in 1945 at the Teatro…