A long time ago I had a girlfriend who was afraid of heights. We were up on the observation deck of a tall building when she told me. I was quick to sympathize. I explained that I’d once tried to help some friends paint the roof of their barn, that I’d spent the entire afternoon…
Continued from: Extroverted Before Breakfast (Part 1) Recently Ariel and I were planning a trip to a place where we knew there would be lots of stairs and cobblestone streets. It would be hard to drag around the kind of luggage that goes on little wheels, so Ariel got herself a new suitcase that had shoulder straps so…
One morning not long ago, Ariel and I were having breakfast in a very small cafe in a very small town in west Texas. The waitress brought our coffee, and suddenly Ariel’s face lit up. The coffee had arrived in old-fashioned mugs like the ones that used to be common in small cafes: extra-thick white porcelain…
Baby Boomers were told that Science would fix everything. They need to get over their disappointment. “Doctors don’t know anything,” the woman said, and a half-dozen heads nodded in automatic agreement. The crowd at the party was mostly about my age – Baby Boomers, though it’s getting harder all the time to picture us as babies.…
Here at Professor Gumby we’re committed to bringing you at least one new exercise in pointless nostalgia every month. But the holidays took their usual toll, killing countless brain cells, and then several particles of what might have been sleet were spotted in southern Texas, paralyzing traffic for days. So here we are on January 31, practically empty-handed.…
Gumby has written here about the futility of asking one generation to understand another generation’s music. I think he’s mostly right, despite a few exceptions that prove the rule, like the Beatles getting rediscovered every twenty years, or that Canadian guy who thinks he’s Frank Sinatra. What Gumby didn’t mention is that there’s plenty of…
When I was a kid there were commercials on TV for a food product called Rice-A-Roni. Of course Rice-A-Roni still exists; it’s just hard to imagine a corporation today buying millions of dollars worth of air time to advertise a side dish. But during the late 1960s, there was a media blitz going on for…
I’ve had a sobering experience. In the interest of clearing shelf space, but really because I fancied myself a messianic figure dispensing sheer joy and pleasure to a larger universe, I decided to give away about 200 of my old CDs. (Bet you can see where this is going!) It was at a family gathering, and the…
“What happened?” It’s been a couple of months now since Sara and I met at Starbuck’s, when she mentioned she had a friend who was going to Saudi Arabia to work. Sara asked me what I thought might be different about the Kingdom since I had left it.
Not too long ago a good friend of mine asked me what I thought had changed about Saudi Arabia since I left it many years ago. “A friend of mine is going there to work,” said Sara, “and she’ll be living in the same town you lived in.” Perhaps I had some helpful observations for a…
Gumby & Fidge 