Category: Author

I came to Antigua, Guatemala, for the most elaborate Holy Week celebration in the Western Hemisphere. I was eager to immerse myself from Palm Sunday through Easter in art, music, culture, and spectacle wrapped in Christian spirituality. I wanted to see the beautiful street “carpets” made from colorful sawdust and created by locals. I wanted…

“I wish I could, but I just can’t do the right thing until everyone agrees that it’s the right thing to do.” [Published July 1999 in Unity Magazine and September 2000 in Spectrum Magazine] If you’ve ever struggled to be true to yourself, struggled to get others in your family, the office, the PTA, and…

Early in my newspaper career I realized, quite by accident, that I was more than a writer or reporter, even more than an editor. It happened in the late 1970s. I’d just hand-delivered the weekly newspaper I edited to a local pianist who played nightly at a popular steak house in town. I’d heard that…

My Sweetheart longed to visit South America. He wanted to practice his Spanish. Wanted to taste authentic South American dishes. Wanted to photograph volcanoes. The large continent had never called to me, but I love him, I enjoy travel and we aren’t getting any younger, so if we’re ever going to take such a trip…

 [published in Sierra Seasons Magazine] I used to think that fairy tales were just for tiny tots.  Despite the song “Young at Heart,” which proclaims “Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you,” I just assumed that the star-dust magic of fairy tales glittered only in the lives of little children. But then,…

When I first moved to California, nearly 40 years ago, I felt the elation of someone who has just stepped into Paradise. The climate alone was enough to make you think you were in heaven: mild temperatures all year round. Blue sky all summer and most of the fall. Few pesky insects. I grew up…

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…

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…

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…

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…

[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…