Opinion

This column about Homecoming appearing 12 days after the events of that week is not a mistake, I felt that coverage in last week’s edition needed nothing further about the subject, so it appears this week as planned. A bit of confusion arose in my...

“Facts you wish were true. The news.” That line was uttered by a comedian, don’t ask me the name because I rarely recall anything about comics other than their genders, but it smacks of graveyard humor. And that is true of much of the...

“Darling, darling, we have to stop! This is my cousin’s house!” Car comes to a screeching halt, dust flying. We unload, remove our shoes at the door. Everyone sits in the family room. Boiling hot chai tea is produced in tiny glass cups with...

Real estate is not for the faint of heart. I think most of us who have been in the business for a while would agree that it takes quite a measure of grit and determination to navigate our industry for any period of time...

The clock ticked swiftly on, meticulously in sync with the movement of the world. The hourglass turned again and, before you knew it, I was approaching another big birthday. All birthdays are truly marvelous, honestly, another trip around the sun, a bonus chance to...

I have often thought about the people whose names appear regularly in our Valley papers and how I too often take their contributions as just matter of fact and miss the nuances. In last week’s edition, there appeared two photographs of rodeo competitors taken...

“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli; we will fight out country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.” Many will recognize that refrain as the opening words of the Marines’ Hymn; I became aware of the song and the...

It has been a very long time since our last tea party — 2019, if I’m not mistaken. Prior to Covid, the annual tea parties were very popular. Then Covid came along and sucked all the fun, drove our traditions into the ground. Somehow...

In 1986 I worked for California’s Employment Development Department, where I processed amnesty seekers under President Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration reform law called Immigration and Control Act (IRCA). The Watsonville office reviewed documents proving that applicants had worked in the local farming economy for...

Below is what happens when a writer is somewhat confined to his immediate surroundings; that writer reads a lot of books and views a lot of documentaries and then sits down at the keyboard and just lets the fingers go where the imagination, and...