Imagine. You have been cooped up for what seems like three years. In fact, soon it won’t “seem” like three years. It will be three years of COVID-19. Or to be more precise, your regularly timed trip somewhere hasn’t happened long enough so that, well, in the end four years have elapsed. I mean, that’s long enough, isn’t it? Imagine. Imagining is a good thing. Unfortunately, it can be a bad thing if you’re imagining things that simply cannot turn out the way you want them to. And Read more [...]

It is not accurate to say that I was born in Banning, California. I was born in Redlands, California, because it had a hospital. Banning didn’t, which tells you everything you need to know about that small desert town in 1946. Let’s fast forward to 1962. I am living upstairs from my father’s doctor’s office. Why? Because my parents’ disastrous marriage has turned into a disastrous divorce, and my brother and I are living there. No, not in the office, but upstairs. My father had created Read more [...]

Gosh, but there is nothing like the San Francisco museums to delight a person in the summer. In terms of the content of these museums, well, everyone knows that America’s great robber barons ran off with a lot of loot from Europe when they could. So, U.S. museums tend to have wonderful collections closer to where your typical 19th century tycoon liked hanging out: Chicago and New York.  But never mind. Because San Francisco is San Francisco. The city’s museums are beautifully located. One Read more [...]

In the mornings, I do exactly what my physiotherapist tells me to do. Warm up. Do some leg raises. Or are they hip hiker flexions? Can’t remember my muscular anatomy. Doesn’t matter either. It’s hard. It’s very hard to get things moving in the morning, any morning. And don’t under any circumstances ask why. Why is it so hard? Why am I doing it? Why does it matter? Does anything matter?  What is matter? That was the question, the only question, on the minds of my first employers. Read more [...]

How can one complain when the San Francisco sky is unaccountably blue? In fact, I noted this just a moment ago, staring idly out of the writer’s window, as one does. And as I learned under remarkably similar conditions in London 50 years ago, one must make hay while the sun literally shines. So, you can count on my emergence from this cloister out into the brighter meteorological world, forthwith. No question that it has a dampening effect, the summer fog. And the summer cold. My nephew from Read more [...]

I haven’t been eating. Honest. There are quite a few hours of the day when I’m hungry. So why, when I got on the scale this morning, have I put on one pound? Why? Things were supposed to be going in the opposite direction. They aren’t. And I have this goal: to fit into my suit before we hit the road at the end of August. The road leads to the Queen Mary, where there is a dress code involving suits. Actually, that code involves dark suits, as a minimum, several nights. Tuxedos being on prominent Read more [...]