I love Facebook. LOVE it. During the past few years, Facebook was sometimes the highest emotional point of my day. But Facebook also amplified my own anger, and there was already plenty of anger to go around.
Plus, since reading about how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to help get Trump into office, I have felt guilty about using Facebook. I figured if my clicking on Facebook has given Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer a hand in their nefarious schemes,
I’m in court, sitting and watching the young men who fill up the benches, waiting for their turn. These men who should be hoisting the sails of a tall-masted ship or catching salmon to feed a village or climbing a mountain or pulling an oar with so much power that their boats jet through the water, no other fuel required. We could use their strength – if these men felt strong and able, how different would this country be?
“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.”
~ Roald Dahl
“What makes a good children’s writer? The writer must …be a jokey sort of fellow… must like simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things. He must be unconventional and inventive. He must have a really first-class plot. He must know what enthralls children and what bores them.
With every entrance to the Mall blocked, my new goal was to find a JumboTron, even if I had to watch it from a few miles away. The inauguration is due to start any minute but I’m being shuffled around (with a few thousand other folks) by the National Guard.
Then I’m funneled into a dead end – a ring of PortaJohns. I’m alone in a big crowd and would feel extremely sorry for myself except for the family around me.
In high school, Clarence loved football and was good enough to try out for the Cleveland Browns and the Dallas Cowboys. The night before his Cowboy try-out, a car accident crushed his legs and any hope he had of a career in football. He did menial jobs and played his sax until September of 1971 when he walked to a club called The Student Prince.
“A rainy, windy night it was, and when I opened the door the whole thing flew off its hinges and blew away down the street.
I had trouble naming this column. My first idea was RUNAWAY MOM but that makes me sound flighty. For a while I called it FEELING BETTER but that made me sad. While trying to figure this out, I had the chance to go to Newfoundland with a group of women. 
Talking with these women (none of whom I’d met before) cracked open a shell that I’d formed around myself. The women on this trip didn’t have issues around motherhood — or at least they didn’t have the same issues I did.
The peaches come from Andy Mariani’s orchard in Morgan Hill. They’re so fragrant that I can smell them all the way on the other side of the room. Andy has been growing stonefruit for many years and it shows in the color of his fruit, in the aroma, and the flavor. You can’t get peaches like these in Safeway. You have to come to Andy’s wooden country store on Half Road.
I come here often in the summer – maybe three times a week – and I always bend down to read the index cards set above the fruit.
