This is a good month to be a squirrel at the farm. Acorns are falling like rain and the ground is covered. You hear them hit our metal roof day and night. It is so loud, it sounds as if the trees threw the acorns at the roof. Old wive’s tales say all these acorns are a prediction of a bad winter to come.
Continue reading “Falling Acorns”
I opened the door to the room and the five of them were there. My brother-in-laws, Jack and Don, old friend Tim, Dad, and Cathy’s Dad, Max. All looked robust and in their 50s, except for Max who died at 41 and remained forever young. Tim looked up from the bar. “French 75 Maxie?” I nodded yes.
Continue reading “The Dinner Party”
September 11th is our National Day of Remembrance. I think back to that horrific day, and also recall the unity that came to America afterwards, for a while at least. I now also have something else to think about. I recently learned my dad enlisted in the Army 85 years ago, on SEPTEMBER 11th, 1940. He was all of sixteen.
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OK. Cath and I did a thing. We are in California and bought a camper van. It has been a lifelong dream, and we just pulled the trigger. Over the next couple of weeks, we will drive it 3,000 miles back to Virginia, hopefully the first of many adventures with it.
Continue reading “We Did a Thing”
Having recently revisited Jefferson Airplane and their brilliant “White Rabbit” in a blog about Woodstock, I decided to reread “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. I’m not sure I’d read it since childhood. How close are White Rabbit and Wonderland to each other? Go ask Alice, I think she knows.
Continue reading “Go Ask Alice”
Recently, my wife, Cathy, and her sister Bonnie spent three weeks touring the wilderness and National Parks in Wyoming and Montana in a camper van. I’ll talk a little about that. What I really want to talk about is the people who stole their firewood at a couple of campgrounds.
Continue reading “Stealing Firewood”
Fifty-six years ago, from August 15-18, 1969, a three day festival celebrating Peace and Music took place at Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York. My friend Chuck, all of 19 at the time, drove there with three buddies, and experienced sex, drugs, and great Rock & Roll music at what came to be known as Woodstock.
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We West Point Whiskey Warriors gave it our best shot on the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky. By the numbers, there were fourteen of us ‘78ers, along with eight wives, from twelve states. We sampled at nine distilleries in four days, and had one helluva good time. Numbers of course don’t capture everything, or for that matter, much of anything.
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This write-up is from my friend, Clark Hall (no relation), a Vietnam Veteran. While the words are his, the lessons are for all of us —
60 years ago, on August 3, 1965, an “incident of war” occurred that foreshadowed the human, political and military disaster underscoring the lunacy of the Vietnam War.
Continue reading “Cam Ne”
Although the sky was robin egg blue, it was more a Miles Davis “Kind of Blue” day. It was too beautiful to be driving to a hospital, but that was my destination. It was a Sunday morning, with lite Sunday morning traffic. I was making my way from the Northern Neck to the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia
Continue reading “The Drive (Sunday Morning Coming Down)”
Live Life Exuberantly 