Fishing with a Dotted Line

The young woman helping us was friendly and we struck up a conversation. We tell her about our fly fishing trip and she says, “I love to fly fish!” She tells about her Dad taking her fly fishing just down the road. Before wading into the river, they would stand on a bridge above the water watching the motions of the trout. She loved how they drifted with the current.

The Beauty of Creative Destruction

I have two faces. My nice face smiles on cue and stops at neighborhood lemonade stands, tosses five dollar bills in the tip jar when the barista is not looking and eats blackberry cobbler with ice cream. My ugly face sprinkles tip jars with inconvenient change, mocks McDonald’s eaters and gulps $3 Venti Soy Americano’s […]

Whenever I See Your Smiling Face

Jenna and Lauren express Duchenne smiles while framing my nephew David sporting a retro-eighties mouth-only male smile James Taylor did not sing Whenever I see Your Smiling Face about professional athletes…unless of course he was referring to Phil Mickelson or Magic Johnson. Has scowling become endemic to the upper echelon of sport? Lebron James reaction […]

Stealing Back Cool from Kerouac

I’ve always loved cool…have no idea what it is but I love it. Perhaps I have no idea because cool expresses not one meaning or attitude but many, a cross-pollinated adjective moving fluidly in many cultures and languages. An Anglo can say cool in Chinese (kù 酷) and it means essentially the same as in […]

There’s a tornado in my coffee

My son is writing his undergraduate thesis for Honors Meteorology on the topic, The Genesis of Tornadoes. I was wondering if The Revelation of Tornadoes might be easier to write. Tornado prediction is a non-linear dart tossed into the misty morning fog. It’s fraught with downdrafts of hope and gusts of unfounded certitude. Yet we […]

15 minutes of fame and paranoia

A had a fifteen minute interlude yesterday at the airport that began in relational euphoria and ended in paranoia. Moments occur daily that signal my grasp of human relations, the mastery I have in moments of stress, the ability to charm and placate, to create world peace with a warm smile and a few charming […]