One of my great pleasures is to look back over the course of events that brought me to my current relationship with a beloved place or person or thing, and to remember the coincidences and actions and interactions that were key steps in those journeys from there to here, then to now.
Posts published in “Essays”
On February 22, 1998, Pete Gallagher arrived at Building 13 at Solano State Prison in Vacaville, California. It was Gallagher’s thirteenth year behind bars, and…
We’re only a year removed from Matt Cain’s perfect game. Certainly legions of Giants fans would say this was the finest performance ever by a…
Last week the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a story titled, “Winegrowers facing labor hurdles as harvest season approaches.” The story began, “Grape growers and…
There is one supreme and universal law of human relations in all its manifestations, social, political, economic, cultural: people create no end of mischief in…
Fifty-five years ago the Giants moved from New York to San Francisco. I was four years old and occasionally hid in our large clothes hamper…
Continued from last week’s AVA, the Congressional hearing at which marijuana prohibition was debated. The witness, Dr. William Woodward of the American Medical Association, expressed…
She could be seen nearly any day of the week, sitting on the the sidewalk outside the market or liquor store. She would usually have her cats with her, crowded into a pet box. She wore several layers of clothing which she got from the free box, topped off by a floppy hat made of white cotton eyelet. Her name was Nellie.
On several occasions during the summer when I was twelve-years-old, I felt certain I was on the verge of understanding how everything fit together, and I do mean everything. I would find myself sitting or standing very still and feeling all the countless separate parts of reality coalescing and clicking together; and with every passing moment I would become more and more excited as the myriad fragments fell into place in relation to each other and in relation to the entirety of everything else.