Rocking chair time

Two of our most important possessions are rapidly vanishing, and the disappearance is having a profound effect on our ability to stay connected as a community and as a family. One is the front porch, and the other is the rocking chair. In many parts of the country front porches have a short useful season [...]

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A flimsy, badly designed, and expensive America

This post appears to be a lament about poor quality goods. Actually, it’s about how easy it is to buy our silence. The $35 case for my iPhone literally fell apart a couple of days ago, and I went shopping for another one. One might think that a cheap trinket at this price would have [...]

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One more thing Bob Dylan has that you don’t

I just bought a book about Bob Dylan, the one you see here. It was on the rack at Safeway. It occurs to me that if kids can read about Bob Dylan, they should be able to read about their own parents and grandparents. I offer my professional services to people who want to create [...]

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“Care of the Soul” is 20 years old

Thomas Moore’s book, Care of the Soul, A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, turns 20 this year. When it was published I immediately bought two copies. That is how much the book speaks to me. The book has never been more sorely needed, in my opinion, as we watch our world [...]

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How to choose a U.S. president

The reason we get so much incompetent government in the United States is that we have so many incompetent voters. I don’t really blame politicians for egregious behavior because in almost every case we could have predicted it. We dare them to be bad. Given what is at stake, it would behoove us to make [...]

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Student films at the University of Arizona

Thanks to invitations from Yuri Makino, I have attended more than a half dozen showings of student films in the last couple of years. Yuri is associate professor in the School of Theatre, Film & TV at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona. I’ve seen finished works as well as works in [...]

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Rod Sparks and me

Lahody, Sparks and I were the Three Musketeers in 1966 and 1967 when we served in the First Marine Brigade on the island of Oahu. We hung out together constantly. Ron, the only one of us with any money beyond the $177 a month we were being paid, bought a station wagon that we named [...]

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86 seconds that will change the way you think about family history

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An update for my video coaches

There are two schools of thought about showing your first efforts in a new endeavor. One view holds that prototypes should be kept in the laboratory where their obvious shortcomings will not attract attention to the craftsman’s incompetence and trials by error. The other is that attracting constructive criticism will hasten the development of knowledge [...]

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Tucson on a cloudy day

Tucson had cloud cover this morning, and I decided to take a walk around some of the blocks near the Hotel Congress and look for interesting scenes. Cool weather in this city is so sweet, and it won’t last. There is no substitute for walking through alleys to get to know a city. To see [...]

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