Daily Blues & Views

 We never had much money.  This I knew.  We had a home, most of the comforts of life and enough to eat.  But it seemed like everyone else had a bit more.  Maybe it was because we didn't have a car.  Last in the neighborhood to get a television sit too.  But I always had some new clothes at the start of every school year, and decent shoes.  But money...No. Still, in the 1950s, as a child growing up in Southern California there were ways to get a few coins to rattle around in my pocket.  Bottles meant pennies. Pennies filled parking meters with time and mouths with bubble gum. We hardly had an ecological consciousness, but knew that every soda bottle brought back to the little Mom and Pop store in the neighborhood was worth two cents.  Two shiny pennies that could become 10 with a few more empty bottles.   Beck's was that little store.  They had a few shelves stocked with canned goods and kitchen supplies.   A mother section...

 Have you ever had to provide a distraction?  Guiding someone, or a group of people, from seeing or hearing something for the common good.  It can be a noble pursuit even though it sounds like there is the possibility of deception.  But remember the word is distraction.   People who can compartmentalize their mind are good at this.  They provide the necessary shift from one thing to another because there is a significant reason to do so.   Case in point:  One summer, I was teaching in a special summer program for high school students at U C Berkeley.  I'd had some success with the I-Search paper, a kind of saturation report where students interview people to find answers and information about a question that they need to have answered.  In this format, I taught various journalistic writing and interviewing skills.   I had about 15 kids in this class and they ranged in age fro 11-17.  A couple of middle-school kids with pushy pa...

 I've been dismantling my personal library over the past few weeks.  At its height, I must have had about 500 books in all.  Collected from the time I first entered college all through my years as a teacher and up through the last 20 years of retirement, I liked to surround myself with books.  Among the more valuable volumes were those signed by authors at various bookshop readings, and a few things I traced down while doing specific research on the radio programs I produced.  I once counted up 15 different courses I taught over the years, mostly Literature and social science classes. All has specific titles connected to them.  Some of the most interesting or rare volumes in my library were gifts from people who knew my passions.  So there were lots of history titles, fly fishing books, blues autobiographies, novels and non-fiction about thoroughbred race horses, and of course, lots of poetry.   I recently decided I didn't need to own these becaus...

 Last night I witnessed one of the most memorable speeches made by an American president.  Oh, I wasn't there, but observed and listened for just about an hour as the current inhabitant of the White House delivered his comments to the White House Press Corps at their annual dinner.  The nation was curious to see this version as the originally scheduled one this year was abruptly cancelled due to another assassination attempt on the president's life.  Also, it was the first time that Donald Trump personally attended this event while president.  The exceptionally thin-skinned POTUS is not one to appreciate the subtlies of sarcastic humor directed toward his majesty.   So, what made his remarks so memorable?  Their lack of sheer relevancy to anything currently troubling this divided country.  Often one to ramble and drift into the weeds surrounding his prepared text, Trump was in rare form last night.  He was more concerned with the light fixtur...

 It stops with me.  This invisible burden that I've carried for decades definitely stops with me.  I'm the last of the line on my father's side and I have no children.  The name, in all its forms stops with me.  But, it is much more than the name, isn't it?  It's the legacy, the family, the historical continuation.   Maybe it's just a construct.  We are all brothers and sisters, right?  The family of man, or more accurately stated the human family.  That helps to ease the burden.   I don't think about it all that much and I recognize that the word burden may be too excessive.  What I have begun to think about is what will happens to all the evidence that the family did exist.  I have become the keeper of all that remains.  The photos, documents, important papers that once held such import as to be kept secure and protected.   I opened the storage tub that houses this archive today.  Envelopes that contain fa...

 With America poised for a big 250th anniversary party, I'd like to offer my thoughts on the verge of the huge star-spangled, ultra patriotic orgasm about to take place.  Rather than go with the explosions that linger far into the night and the one after that and probably the one after that, I offer a rather thrifty 250. What I am going to do, and what I recommend my fellow Americans do is the following:  Search and find the first verses of Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.  Then, read, sing, or recite them slowly out loud to yourself and anyone else you might be near or able to hold captive.  The key here is slowly.  You might want to practice first.  Read the words over slowly in your mind.  Then, when you think you've read them slow enough, do it again, but even slower.  You don't have to belt them out, but find the volume you feel comfortable with.  The slower the better.  Something might reveal itself much like the detail...