Opinion

Each holiday season comes with high expectations for happy, carefree gatherings. It’s all too true, however, that once the calendar turns to November, feelings of sadness or anxiety can sometimes take hold. Beyond major depression or severe anxiety disorders (which require professional help), it’s common...

Getting an oddball pet can be a great motivator, especially when it provides food for you as well as bug control and an endless supply of fertilizer for the garden. I never thought I’d be one to raise a flock of fowl ever again in...

Because it’s officially the season of giving, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on some precious gifts I’ve witnessed as CEO of Mee Memorial Healthcare System. A present of presence As its name implies, our amazing Service League is the driving force behind an...

I am a reader. I would not venture to estimate how many books I have read since I was a lad in Greenfield, but I dare say it is in the thousands. Since July 28, I have read five books, two on the long...

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;...

It all begun in regular fashion. You are getting ready to go on a trip; so, therefore, things get really het up at work — not in a good way — and you are putting out fires, like California in summer — why does...

One of the first lessons one learns in any writing class is writing about experience is more natural and gets the story (or moral or lesson) across to the reader better than research writing. With that lesson in mind, I should be able to...

When do we stop being the parents to our children? Or, for that matter when do our children quit being our children? For question number one, I would say we never stop being the parents of our kids, but there are extenuating circumstances that...

The City of King has received an increasing number of calls from citizens regarding excessive speeding in residential neighborhoods. As a result, the King City Police Department applied for and received approval for two state grants totaling $102,500 to increase outreach, enforcement and technology.  The...

In a rare case of a column running too long, I offer this story as a two-parter… One day I came home from school, it was 1964 and I was in the sixth grade in Greenfield Elementary School, and my father handed me a book...