Category: Real Personal History
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Joshua Tree Diary: The First Days
I looked in the mirror late this morning and decided I would need a haircut sometime in the next few weeks. Trouble is, we’re a few miles from the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base (the largest U.S. military base in the world, I’m told) and nearly all the haircut places offer a “military cut”. Well,…
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Hotel California
Okay. I ripped off the title of a song by The Eagles for one purpose only: to get your attention. The more accurate title should be A Hotel in California. But that sounds like a chapter in an in-flight magazine for American Airlines. Tonight is our last night here, at the Standard Hotel, on Sunset…
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Love At The End Of The Tunnel
[My photo. Elias leaves pre-K.] The longest and most uncomfortable, painful and seemingly endless flight I ever undertook began at 4:00 am on Monday, November 20 when I forced myself out of the bed. I forgot our wakeup call was for 4:15 am. Our flight was scheduled for 7:00 am. It was going to be…
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The Quiet Feast/The Great Cycle
I felt the breeze… I stumbled on a tree root when… Finally, we reached the pond… Concentrate. Start over. When I was a teacher I was often given the dubious privilege of “lunch duty”. A room, nearly the size of a gym, filled with 5th & 6th graders…or 9th & 10th graders, and a hand…
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Fathers and Coffee
One more cup of coffee before I go… –Bob Dylan [My photo] This gray, almost monochromatic morning, I lounged in bed reading yesterday’s New York Times. It’s something we did every weekend for years while we lived in Manhattan. The…
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At The Museum…For Decades
[I loved this Alaskan canoe when you could see the people in it.] The more things change, the more they stay they stay the same… -Anon. I never understood the above quote, except to say that I think it means that history repeats itself. I certainly can get that…considering the Trump Era. You can figure…
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Roadside Grief
You see them along the Interstate highways in Kansas, Arizona and nearly everywhere else in the country. Those haunting small white crosses and bouquets of flowers that are mostly plastic. That way, they survive the weather. These are the roadside memorials for those who lost their lives, while driving along major highways and lonely roads.…
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Confessions Of A Gravestone Photographer
[At work in St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Chateaugay, NY] I would strongly object to anyone who would dare call me morbid. It is not morbid, in any sense, to appreciate and love old (and new) cemeteries. It is not morbid to stand over a grave of a total stranger and contemplate his or her life. I…
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The Summer We Never Had Is Gone
“I see your true colors shining through…” -Cyndi Lauper Green is still the dominant color in the foliage around Rainbow Lake. Each day, however, brings out a few hundred more leaves that have lost their Chlorophyll and are showing their true colors. We’ve had our first frost warning on my weather app…and that was in…
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The Toboggan
When I enter our garage from the door that faces our house, I don’t often look up. What could be up there that I’m avoiding? Well, there is an old oak bed head-board and foot board that was mine when I grew up at 420 Front Street, Owego, NY. There are stickers of cowboys and…
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