Volts divided by watts equals amps. I’ve learned that now, even though I wouldn’t know a watt from a volt or an amp, were one to suddenly jump out of a wall and bite me in the…    I’d learned this tidy bit of electrical math as a result of a fried electrical outlet. We don’t […]

   Carol was explaining to her daughter a recent couch move in our living room. Pointing toward the end of the couch where I’m normally found and happened to be at that moment, she said, “This one sags.” Mind you, I was wearing a shirt which color matched that of the couch, a shirt that clings […]

   I thought this would be an emphatic but easy “no!” This time Carol had won tickets for something called the Willie Nelson Outlaw Music Festival. If anything sounded like a MAGA magnet to me, this was it. But after my third “no!” It was clear Carol wasn’t even listening to me anymore.  “It’s a festival. […]

   My mother grew up in an orphanage, and my father grew up in the bayous of Louisiana. Both their childhoods spanned the Great Depression. That harshness of that experience did not fade as they slowly clawed their way into a materially sufficient lower middle class. Not wanting their children to go without the way they’d […]

    Probably sixty years after I first read it, I can still recite the opening line to Babe Ruth’s autobiography: “I was a bad kid; I say that without pride…”    Growing up in the 1950s, baseball was THE professional sport, even in a non-professional sports region like New Orleans. (The New Orleans Pelicans were a AA […]

   I was 16 when Hurricane Betsy hung a U-ee in the Atlantic, wrapped itself around Florida and made a beeline for the Louisiana coast. It was September of 1965, and New Orleans was the bullseye of the storm.    The night of the storm, my father made me a highball to “calm my nerves.” My nerves […]

   Carol came into the living room smiling. “I just won $10 tickets to Hamilton for next Thursday.” You might think that direct quote should have been punctuated with an exclamation point. I mean it’s Hamilton, not Guys and Dolls, The Fantastics or Cats. I’ve seen it twice on stage myself and still can’t get enough. […]

  The Sunday Morning show on CBS ended with images of Britain’s New Forest, historically the first Royal Hunting Ground founded in 1079. What wasn’t  stated was that designating a Royal hunting ground meant that land was now off limits to commoners who had previously used the forest as a source of fuel for heat and […]

   I was determined to hold my tongue this time around. I decided that exercising my pet peeve, where people stand and block your view of the stage during a concert, was ineffective. More people were turning around to look for the wingnut exhorting the crowd to “sit down!” than were people who actually sat. I […]

   Last week I mailed my old passport back as part of my renewal application. For the next two or three months I can’t leave the country if I wanted to. This is different from Covid. Then, travel wasn’t available; now it is but I can’t go anywhere. It doesn’t matter that we hadn’t planned any […]