American Airlines began direct service from San Diego to Miami in June, and I took advantage of it at the beginning of August for one of my periodic visits there. The Beatles tune aside, there is no airport in Miami …

By the beginning of June, classes were over at the two colleges where I teach part time; one was actually over a bit before that. For many years I taught summer sessions in the evening at one of them. This …

As a graduate student in linguistics at SDSU in the spring of 1982, the guest speaker at our spring colloquium was Joseph Greenberg, a noted specialist in language universals and language typology. Like many such specialists, he had a particular …

Our condominium complex on University Avenue truly looked like hell a year ago. It was never the most upscale of places anyway, but the real problem is that we live within our means, discuss priorities, and actually plan out our …

Just noticed from an online photo that you can still get those little heart-shaped candies with the lame messages on them. They taste kind of like Pepto Bismal tablets, and back in the '60s at Henry Clay Elementary School--my Alma …

More out of habit than anything else, I set out each year a few days after Christmas for a week or so's travel in Arizona. There are rental properties in Yuma and Prescott to check up on, but it's so …

The Ghost of Christmas Past drags a broken chain and carries a spotty record in my lifetime of memories. Mom put it well in a letter a few weeks before I left Germany in December 1979 after three years there …

Like just about anyone active in the San Diego workforce at midcentury, my mom worked for a time at Convair. She was a secretary there for I don't know how long, and told me toward the end of her life …

It wasn't until some years later that the name for this experience my childhood pals and I lived through would have the word "missile" inserted into the middle of it, and become the iconic "Cuban Missile Crisis." It was shortly …

The German language is often almost cute in its simple logic. Decade is Jahrzehn or "year-ten" and century is "year-hundred." A thimble is a "finger-hat," a racoon is a "wash-bear," and a telephone is a "far-talker." Now I'm at the …

There exists only one psychological/semantic image in my mind for a cookie jar. I'm not even sure what any other cookie jar would look like, as none of my siblings or I have ever owned one. For us, a cookie …

They aren't exactly Incense and Peppermints. They're the smell of wetlands, circa San Diego County, and they evoke a strong reaction in me. They grew along the open drainage ditch behind our house on College Avenue when I was a …

On the last day of last month, on the other side of the continent from our San Diego, not far from the Atlantic coast of our nation's only tropical mainland state, an older middle-aged man was encountered in his car, …

For the past fourteen years, I've complained about the commute from the SDSU area to the community college in North County where I teach part time. Everything else about the job is alright, though, and I've developed a routine that …

Every October I go to a regional conference where, usually just that one time a year, I see people I don't see any other time. My thesis advisor from graduate school days is almost always there. Sometimes I talk to …

Hear in your head the sweet, mournful ending to just about any romantic song; Los Lobos' interpretation of "Goodnight My Love" with its alto sax fadeout comes to mind. Think of autumn, with the start of school and the end …

The house sits quietly, looking like it always did. Occasionally the wind chime in the backyard sounds. I go there a lot, so that it won't seem abandoned. I do most of the work related to the estate there; don't …

My dad passed on last Tuesday, June 21st, following mom by a month short of five years. He was 90 and had lived a good life, almost exactly half of it in the family house in Rolando that we'd moved …

It was called Easter Vacation in those days. Though I can't recall the year, I know it was one of those early sixties Easter Weeks when JFK was in the White House. I was just a bit of a kid …

There's nothing special about street fairs, really. I've been to neighborhood festivals and such in different countries, and they're all--on the surface level, anyway--pretty much the same. A bunch of vendors hoping to make some money set up booths under …