Opinion

To the Editor: Last week’s paper contained a letter detailing one way in which government agencies have failed (“No Happy Ending for Bridge Plaque,” March 23). I’d like to share a story that balances that experience with this letter about how they are succeeding. Last Thursday...

By my reckoning 140 years, give or take, of my family’s timeline was spent in prisons; the years accumulated by my parents, a brother and his wife, a niece and myself. And it seems the family occupation within the California Department of Corrections (CDC;...

I’m sure that I have written often about my trusty old Ford pickup. It is an F-100 that I bought about a month after I got out of the Army. I had been looking for a pickup just like this one. Of course, I...

I have set aside my regular column this week, a little story about me and my dog in Arroyo Seco, nicely told in my humble opinion, but still just a little story; it will wait for another time. What prompted the change was my...

I’m going to tell you a secret. Oh, it’s nothing nefarious or secretive. It’s just something I decided to do a few years ago and it hasn’t been a tremendous success. I’m getting older you know. People usually are nice enough that they say,...

“No doubt the universe will unfold as it should,” I tell my husband (sort of citing my favorite poem “Desiderata”). This was after we returned home from our neighbor’s place up the hill. Most times you go to neighboring homes and receive tomatoes or...

The definition of the word “volunteer,” according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, is a person who does a job without being paid for it. That’s pretty straightforward, but in my opinion it falls a bit short of the mark; if one takes the...

What if they started a war and nobody showed up? These words went to a paper I wrote about 40 years ago while stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. I was an instructor with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance. I attended an evening...

People are digging out maps and figuring out where this place is — Ukraine. Who are these people? They live so far away from us; aren’t we glad we are not them! They seem like a fiercely loyal people — they love their animals...

Somewhere along the line I am sure I mentioned that I have lived and worked in different locales spread across the country and as such there are memorable episodes, one of which came to mind recently so I thought I would share it. I...