Why are pigeons gray? And other vitally important questions.
I'm following up on a previous post on the meaning of home and how laughter helps define it, and on another post on the science behind the benefits of laughing. Here’s an example, one of many, of how the weekly round table of six friends who meet at our local pub, drove, in less than a minute, a perfectly good conversational topic right over the cliffs [...]
Happy Dystopia Week!
Yes folks, it's that time of year again, where thoughts turn to zombies and we are reminded by the Center For Disease Control and FEMA that the federal government has preparedness pages for the apocalypse. I kid you not, see for yourself. And here. This year the only difference is that in Congress and at the White House, shit just got real. The whole country is [...]
The Alchemy of Laughter
My friend Kristen, who is an otherwise upstanding Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, was visiting our home with her husband, Lou. We all knew Kristen takes fitness seriously, but over pre-dinner drinks she surprised us by saying, “Did I ever tell you about the time my mother and I participated in a Nude 5K Race?” A brief silence descended, like the kind you get when someone [...]
Where Everyone Knows Your Name.
It started innocently enough, with our local sailmaker and friend Carol Hasse saying, “Oh, you MUST meet these two new friends of mine! You will absolutely LOVE them!” So she set up a blind date of sorts at our hometown pub: my husband, Jim, and me, with these two strangers Oscar and Bill, who were probably thinking, well this is different. Hasse said, “I’ll be [...]
Road Trip Lit #2
A 7-hour, 460-mile drive on I-90 from coastal Washington got me to Wallace, Idaho and a campground next to a pub, to which of course I repaired, forsaking camp ramen. It had been an easy drive except for the kid in a beat-up pickup truck driving the wrong way on a bridge in Kellogg, Idaho, in a 75-mph speed zone. You never saw cars scatter [...]
Road Trip Lit
When you think about a road trip, what comes to mind? A sizeable corral of literature beckons—Steinbeck, Kerouac, Pirsig, Wolfe, Bryson—hey wait, where are the women writers? Is Thelma and Louise our only touchstone, complete with its Freudian cliff-plunge ending? No. There are plenty of good women writers writing interesting travel and adventure books, but you have to google the topic to learn who they [...]