I grew up in the Midwest during the Great Depression. As was the case with most families, we were poor, but there was, nevertheless, a small upright piano in our living room. There were upright …

Matthew: Why don't penguins fly? — Sarah Lopez, Euclid Elementary School Gee, we see penguins on the bus all the time. You’d think one day one of them would hop a plane just to see …

Dear Matthew Alice: Munching on one of my favorite snacks, raisins, I noticed a nutritional difference between white seedless raisins and the regular ones. The white seedless raisins have 0.5gfat, 20mg sodium, 36g carbohydrates, and …

Last year, professor and poet Lorenzo Thomas of the University of Houston—Downtown informed me that two of my novels, Mumbo Jumbo and Reckless Eyeballing, would be subjects of a panel during the 110th annual convention …

Sefior Mateo: Back in Boy Scouts, we had this ongoing debate about why exactly bugs hated bug repellent. Some claimed it was the smell. Others claimed it was the taste. Still others that it created …

The names of quilts are like children’s games that are played with a loop of string: Feathered World without End, Hands All Around, Courthouse Steps, Tumbling Blocks, Joseph’s Coat. Some quilters, including Reggie, know the names at a glance.

Now painted a deep, electric blue-green with bright white trim, the shabby clapboard structure is partly uninhabitable and deserted, though a beauty parlor on the ground floor remains in business and pays its rent to the city.

Hello, Straight: I'd like you to find a legal reference to what I think/believe/have been told. When a person is sentenced in the U.S. to be in jail for more than one year, automatically that …

Oh, Great Enlightened One: Who, pray tell, invented the zero? I have heard, through the movie Stand and Deliver, that the Mayans invented it. Several engineers I work with claim that the zero is Arabic. …

A little-known fact: Jackson Browne was once a member of the Velvet Underground. Not really. But not far off. I have a correspondent in Tokyo, a magazine editor, who tells me that the current crop …

Aller traced Kate’s early palms (including those on Horton Plaza, Sixth Avenue, and Orange Avenue in Coronado) to seeds acquired by a nurseryman from a South African conservatory 40 years earlier. That would have dated them to 1892.

Dear Matthew Alice: When I was serving a sentence in the Navy in the ’70s, there was a salty rumor floating around that I accepted as gospel. First: The Coronado bridge is designed to float …

Dear Matthew Alice: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound? Some say yes. Some say no. What is behind the question? — …

Dear Matthew Alice: How come carnivorous animals can eat raw meat but we humans must cook it or else we get sick? Did we invent fire so long ago that we have biologically come to …

“What’s developed since, are ‘personality bunnies,’ items as Willy Wacket, a hollow bunny with a tennis ball and tennis racket. There’s Dapper Dan, a hollow milk chocolate fellow who wears a pink candy top hat.”

San Diego is one of the only basketball meccas where beach sand tracked onto the court is part of the game. At South Mission or Crown Point or in North County at Pillbox or Glen Park up in Cardiff.

Crazy-quilt patches of somber and giddy sound formed the literal fabric of my tender world. I grew up in homes where the verbal jam session was a floating and usually festive fixture. Clusters of people …

On day 193 of the major-league baseball strike, we were five rows behind the Padres dugout in the seats my friend Anna had struggled to reserve. Anna lives in Scottsdale. One Saturday, she set out …

Hey, Matt... Suppose for a moment Earth’s core isn’t composed of molten lava. Now suppose that a tunnel was bored straight through, beginning here in San Diego, and out the other side of the planet. …

Dear Matt: Where do we get the expression to give someone the raspberries? Or why is that razzing sound called raspberries? — Not My Real Name, San Diego Best I can piece this together, we …

Grunge replaced Goth as the year’s passing fashion fad, and soon she was wearing ripped jeans and flannel shirts to school, apparently no more acceptable to the peer groupies than black velvet and wan looks.

When I taught creative writing at UCSD, I was impressed by the adventurous sculpture sited around campus — The Stuart Collection. Since campuses are gardens, these sculptures are garden sculptures, animating and conferring scale on …