Mom and Dad were gone for the day. They left Adam and I with Ma and Pa Sanders. We were forbidden to return to our home for any reason. However we disobeyed because we wanted to play with our new roller skates. The two of us roller skated up and down Redwood Drive and in…

For three months, I worked at the Requa Inn. I was filling in for my brother, Adam after he broke his arm in a bicycle accident. At first Adam tried to blame Dad for breaking his arm. That’s because Dad grabbed it after Adam attempted to stab me with a dinner fork. Dr. Kasper said it…

Mom and Dad had spent three months paneling the living room and hallway. They also put squares of gold-veined mirror up in the front room hoping to make the area look bigger. One of the extra things they did was to mount into the wall an old piece of ship’s timber that acted as a…

One of the first photographs I ever took was of the stop-sign and telephone pole where Redwood Drive intersects with U.S. 101 in Klamath. I grew up in a home on Redwood Drive and anytime we went anywhere, we had to use that singular intersection to leave our neighborhood. My parents bought me a Kodak…

One of my part-time jobs was working as a summer-school teacher. The position turned out to require more interpersonal skill than I had at the time. One afternoon I watched as a kid on a motorcycle raced around the playground while students were outside playing. I stopped him and told him he couldn’t be on…

Mary and Russ Thompson had been visiting the area for years. They came to spend their summertime fishing for salmon and they always parked their travel trailer in space right behind our home at Camp Marigold. We came to know them a few years earlier and when they were in town, we often invited them…

The weather was wonderful for a winter-day in Northern Nevada, as last year at this time the region was covered in a blanket of snow. It was also made wonderful by the fact that the state’s constitution was in full swing and anyone who wanted to watch it operate was allowed to do so. For…

My junior year civic’s class teacher was a Jules Legier.  One guy, two unusual names in a school full of Bob’s, Bill’s and Tom’s. One day Mr. Legier chastised the entire class for not being able to spell “Crescent City.”  Evidently some of the students were having difficulty with the proper name of the town. He…

It was an April morning when Tommy spoke with Roberta. Her husband had been killed in Iraq in October of the previous year. He wanted to find out why the Sergeant didn’t have plaque at the Fernley Veterans Cemetery near the couples home. “The veteran’s administration is refusing to allow the Wiccan symbol to be placed…

As I was watching a TV piece about the English language, I realized that being lazy is not an excuse to act ignorant . That’s because this ‘educational’, show attempted to point out that Ebonics and other forms of slang-uage are just another form of the English language. By the time the hour was up,…