Vacation and Daisy
For the first time in three years, we’re taking a vacation. To many people this will sound completely un-American, but life is like that sometimes. At last we’re away for eight glorious days and seven relaxing nights, a car trip to northern California and Nevada to...
Musicians and Other Hoarders
For many years I worked as a musician. With a childhood education in piano and cello, a knowledge of bass guitar acquired in my twenties and a bit of singing, I held up my half of a music duo for a decade-plus. To the uninitiated, this might sound like a joyful way to...
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is a prime tool in every communications tool box. Writers, as a breed, are prone to exhaustive searches for exactly the right words to use in their poetry and prose. I often suffer from this malady, and have recently thought back to the last time I was...
Where There’s Smoke
Like virtually everybody else in the American northwest, this week I am surrounded by smoke. Forest fires, wild fires, caused by nature and caused by mankind, rage all over the western states. In my corner of southeast Washington, wind blowing from any direction...
My First Writing Gig
Nineteen Sixty-Eight. The Vietnam War rages. Peggy Fleming skates her way to Olympic gold. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated. Richard Nixon is elected president. Star Trek episode “Plato’s Children” features the first-ever interracial kiss...
Brain Teasers for the Apocalypse
If you’re like me, lately you’ve been obsessing about the world coming to an end. Whether it happens as the result a scuffle between nuclear powers, is a picture-perfect playing out of the Book of Revelations, or the result of the Universe reaching the limits of its...
