Upon entering the London Underground for the first time, I had no idea what “Mind the Gap” meant until I saw it written on the station platform as I crossed the gap to the train. Being visual, I got “Look Right” immediately. It appears that many Americans are prone to the pedestrian’s equivalent of a […]
You Can’t Buy a Game
“You can’t buy a game.” Even though I know my brother-in-law is right, it hasn’t stopped me from trying. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you are obviously not a golfer. Golf is a hard game to master. It requires lots of practice. My brother-in-law, a former teaching and touring pro, told […]
Olivia’s Christmas List
I want to do great things, but it is the little things I do each day that are the great things. That paraphrase of an Ann Kiemel quote is my life motto. It both inspires and frustrates me. It frustrates me because I wonder if I will ever do anything noticeably great. At the same […]
The Certainty of Death and the Uncertainty of Life
What I saw was unforgettable. What I heard was unrepeatable. Many years ago, I was helping a mortician and a police officer pull a car with a dead body in it from the Sacramento River. It appears that the driver had driven her car into the river, probably at the old Ord Bend ferry ramp […]
Panic Attack
“Tell me what the symptoms are and if I don’t have them, I’ll get them for you.” I actually said that to my doctor and he smiled, not because he thought it was a joke but, because he knew it was the truth. When you’re a borderline hypochondriac, it’s hard to distinguish the real from […]
Temptation
I figured I was going to hell because disgust would not have been my reaction. I was a normal 16-year-old boy with raging hormones and my Sunday school teacher was explaining the story of Joseph and his master’s wife. For those of you who do not know the story, Joseph was a Hebrew slave in ancient Egypt […]
Regrets
Unlike Sinatra, I have had a lot of regrets – way more than I would care to mention. The earliest regret I can remember is asking my Mom to take me over to play at Pam Clark’s house when I was in kindergarten. The unmerciful teasing by my classmates for having a girlfriend still hurts […]
Fight or Flight or Another Way
In the first chapter of her autobiography Sipping Tea with Buddha and Christ , Alexa Benson-Valavanis tells the story of an old man in London who was trapped in a dead end alley by three young men. Certain that he would be beaten and robbed, and knowing that “fight or flight” were not viable options, he searched […]