Opinion

Garden serenity is getting difficult in the afternoons with the dual challenge of ever-rising temperatures and afternoon winds that seem like they’re powerful enough to give Dorothy another trip to Oz. The morning and evening calms, however, make it all worth it. For those who...

With the world starting to reopen, we were hoping to have a bit of a newsie reunion. Several of us from the newspaper industry had remained friends over the years, enabled by the easiness of social media and genuine friendships that survived the test...

When will the pandemic end? That’s a complicated question, and difficult to answer. There will be no “light switch” moment where our lives suddenly return to what we call “normal.” In many ways, this pandemic has been like a long, destructive storm, perhaps a...

Do you remember the year 2000? I had forgotten a lot about that year until I had a chance to visit my brother, who lives in Idaho, last week. He loves Idaho, but I didn’t lose anything up there. However, it had been a...

The other day I had invited one of my best friends to come down from Oregon to have lunch and just catch up. Gordon has a son that lives off the grid up in Oregon, and so he spends a lot of time up...

Is everything OK? I mean no one has gone bonkers about having to stay inside? Of course there are a lot of things not getting done since we can’t do a lot of the things we took for granted getting done. My youngest said...

Busy people stay busy. And not much alters with time, despite your best efforts to spend more time relaxing at home with a novel, or … ahem … working on your own novel. As many of you know, I have been trying to work on...

Things have sure been happening fast, haven’t they? No trouble finding all sorts of things to write about. My blushing bride asked me to write only good pleasant things or humorous things and I tried. Honest! It’s difficult to write happy things when our...

The waiting is the worst. I don’t think there is anyone who would challenge me on that. I get flashbacks to my own cancer diagnosis from 10 years ago. One test slowly crawled to another and you are in the waiting room of your...

Downtown Soledad on a Saturday can be a bustling little place. People’s comings and goings to the hardware store, the barber or the pharmacy. Getting an ice cream or some Mexican food for the family. Normal life is slowly returning. I had a mission...