There are some days you never forget. Tuesday, October 17, 1989, was such a day. The late afternoon sun warmed California’s deep blue sky. Perfect baseball weather. Fans eager for the third game of the World Series filed into Candlestick Park. Other fans, like me, turned on their TVs, hoping for a SF Giants come…

[Published in May 2022 issue of Sasee Magazine] Without saying a word, my mother taught me a truth that has set me free. I was a teenager, when my 39-year-old, stay-at-home mom decided to become a nurse. She did not drive and we lived on a lake in the country about fifteen miles from where…

Prologue: The drive from my home to West Point, California, covers 40 miles. The drive north along State Highway 49 and then east on State Highway 26 rises from 1,400-feet elevation in the rolling Gold Rush foothills to about 3,000-feet elevation on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Near West Point, the…

Recently I saw an old “60 Minutes” profile of Billy Joel. It was made well before the Covid 19 shut-down.  I’m a fan, so I enjoyed his interview and hearing segments of his famous songs. But then he tried to dance like a swiveling-hipped youngster.  When his thick, middle-aged body attempted a slow, slightly painful…

Whenever I hear clichés about equal opportunity — that it’s available to all, that anyone who works hard can ” make it” thanks to equal opportunity — I wince because I know better. My knowledge comes from a hot September afternoon in 1964, the day I started my senior year in high school. I attended a…

Thumbs down. That’s been the consensus on the Jimmy Carter presidency for more than 25 years. Nevertheless, I liked the man despite his short-comings in office. The lively strength of his mother, Miss Lillian, and the gracious intelligence of his wife, Rosalynn, told me plenty about him and his own self-confidence.   When Jimmy Carter was…