Opinion

It has been a very long time since our last tea party — 2019, if I’m not mistaken. Prior to Covid, the annual tea parties were very popular. Then Covid came along and sucked all the fun, drove our traditions into the ground. Somehow...

Many times, over the past five decades I drove between Southern California and the Salinas Valley on El Camino Real, aka the 101, and so am very acquainted with the stretch of asphalt from Santa Barbara to SoMoCo. Now, like motorists everywhere finding a...

So I’m sitting in my favorite chair lacing up my tennis shoes when the phone rings. I’m only a little concerned because Lorraine pays all the bills and she has not advised me that we are in trouble. I look at the phone only...

Have you noticed any strange looking grasshoppers around your house lately? They would be brown and they can almost fly. They are also quite a bit larger than your run-of-the-mill grasshopper, they may very well be locusts. It seems that is the only thing...

Time passes, locales change, friends come and go. We all experience changes, we graduate high school, some go on to college before joining “the working world” while others set straight in to building a life, and so begins the diaspora of those we knew...

I am not sure what mental quirk, not a medical term, takes place in brain wave synapses, a medical term, triggers a memory which in turn elicits a mental response, but I know they happen; happened to me recently. In this instance, I was...

Have you ever been to Macy’s? I mean THE Macy’s, the flagship store on 34th Street on the island of Manhattan. A couple of decades ago, I had the opportunity to wander about New York City’s boroughs, all but Staten Island, and of course...

Last Sunday one of the readers of this column listened, patiently I suspect, to my not uncommon lament of having a deadline in the near future and not a single word written, whereupon he responded that I say that every week and every week...

I had been looking forward to 2020. At Solace, we were going to be empty nesters for the first time ever, work seemed positive, we had lovely trips planned — places to go and people to see, both here and abroad. I’m not ordinarily...

What if they started a war and nobody showed up? These words went to a paper I wrote about 40 years ago while stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. I was an instructor with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance. I attended an evening...