I never learned to be much of a poker player. In school the game we played during lunch periods or at other odd free times was spades, about which I remember very little. No matter. Another game sticks much more in my memory, and it’s one that I still play on occasion with family and friends: hearts. It was my mother who was the prime instigator of this...
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Every year around midwinter I seem to find myself back down in the Sonoran Desert for a spell, if only to shake off sub-freezing temperatures and remind myself what the warmth of the sun feels like. This year, it was a several-day trip that I took to Yuma a week ago. The immediate purpose was to see in person how the midwinter production of leafy green...
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The annual appearance of holiday lights in Wheeler Park is one of those seasonal manifestations of civic effectiveness that, like snow plowing and maintaining the water and sewer lines, are easy to take for granted. But I want to take a public stand here and state that it’s gotten better over the years, the chains of lights climbing high enough into tree...
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There wasn’t a good place to be in the days after the election. For someone who believes that the candidate we’ve just elected disqualified himself years ago when he forsook his oath to defend the Constitution by choosing to watch TV while his supporters ransacked the Capitol, there was no escaping a sickening feeling of doom, or a feeling of uncanniness...
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In August, the ticking of the world’s clocks grows ever louder. In part that’s due to the looming closeness of the school year, a tangled cliff that’s always been present at the edge of summer’s smooth plateau (and that through my lifetime has come to begin ever earlier). This is my fault: I have clearly exacerbated my sense of summer’s mortality by...
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