One thousand words…
We scheduled our trip down the Keys so as to avoid the human embarrassments that attend Spring Break. We sought spectacular sunsets, coral reefs, beachside conversation.
We came for the waters. We were misled.
We didn’t know that the Florida colleges let out their students a week early, so that they will [...]
Everglades City, FL
I stood on the bottom coast of Florida, with the Gulf offshore, mangrove and grassy everglades in every other direction, two hours to Miami, but times away from big town currency and gloss. There are no big boxes, chain motels, or fast food franchises in Everglades City. It doesn’t look like Interstate Everyplace, [...]
On the Gulf edge of south Florida, just a bridge away from Fort Myers, Sanibel Island is a shell-collecting singularity.
The thin island’s southern coast catches a confluence of waves, winds, and currents that drive bazillions of shells onto the beach.
At Tokyo’s Narita Airport, Mr. Mizutani shook my hand, bowed slightly and said, “Kotora-san, you have safe trip home.”
“Why,” I asked Mr. Mizutani, “do you pronounce my name Kotora? My name isn’t COAT-ler. It’s COT-ler. Why don’t you call me Katora?”
Mizutani took a deep breath and smiled broadly. “Kotora good name. [...]
Near the end of my stay, to thank me for my efforts, six Japanese executives took me to dinner at a very upscale Tokyo restaurant. I had read guidebooks that highlighted cultural differences and how Americans abroad should behave, but nothing had prepared me for this.
In the early 70’s, as assistant to the president and product manager for a small, NYSE-listed business machines company, I traveled to Tokyo to teach our Japanese affiliate how to sell our new product, the world’s first high-speed, commercial fax machine. I was 27.
My introductory talk was to 60 men, all of whom leaned [...]
There is very little to recommend California’s Interstate 5 except straightness and speed.
In a midsummer’s sunset somewhere south of Buttonwillow, I am rolling at 80, glazed by oncoming lights and nearly listening to bad luck and worse love on a Country FM out of Visalia. I lift, drink, and am under an inch in [...]
In the summer of 2002, Ann and I were in Sevilla, walking back to our lodging after a typically late dinner. It was midnight, but the twisty, cobbled lanes were not entirely deserted. As we entered a three-way street junction, lit only by a few faraway home lights, two young men on a [...]
What actually happens is not always in the history books.
I grew up in California in the 50’s, graduating from high school in 1961, only 16 years after World War II ended. So how was it possible that in all my classes there was not one mention of the internment of Americans of Japanese [...]
At Little Big Horn National Monument, a low, iron railing surrounds the modest, marble slabs that mark where each white man fell. The fenced rectangle is smaller than my back yard. Custer’s Last Stand…for 123 years an immense celebration of an ignominious outrage. The day is overcast, cold, and wet. Forty-eight degrees [...]
