December 25, 2025 The Nightmare After Christmas Lately, I’ve been having this recurring bad dream: after Christmas, everyone starts putting their old plastic trees out at the curb for the trashmen to pick up. Bent, sunbleached, branch-missing, short-circuited “trees” that they don’t want anymore, piled by the sidewalk, up and down the street. What’s going…
November 11, 2025 The Twilight Zone Who needs a billionaire’s ride in a dinky little space capsule? We’re on a much larger spacecraft (2.5 million times larger), furnished with every comfort on Earth, a perfectly pressurized atmosphere, its own moon to light the dark phases of the circuit — hurtling away from the Sun at…
“Dark Stories” When all the light had gone from the sky, our ancestors gathered in the caves or beneath the heavy, overhanging rock, the fires were lit, the meal shared, the families clustered in their spots, the little ones slept at their mothers’ breasts, the old ones struggled to find a comfortable position in the…
August 16, 2025 August — the middle of summer — that is, the way summer used to be. Kids were out of school (mostly); activities moved outdoors. There were excursions, like a trip to the Natural History Museum or the La Brea Tar Pits, maybe a day at Marineland of the Pacific. There were swimming…
This month we observed the anniversary of the birth of our nation. The day we have chosen is not the anniversary of the actual establishment of the nation, but the day when the dream of that nation was put to paper. It took our predecessors nearly twelve more years to agree to the final terms…
“Orange Empire” While Orange, CA got there about about 32 years before Hawthorne had a chance of being associated with the iconic fruit of Southern California (second place, Los Angeles: “the Big Orange”), the world’s most popular citrus variety is right at home in our city and oranges picked off the tree here will always…
April 15, 2025 “Old School” Looking out from the tree-shaded Park onto busy Prairie Avenue, the building named to commemorate Jim Thorpe on February 23, 1974, is probably the oldest standing connection to our City’s first school, Hawthorne Grammar School. The town of Hawthorne was granted permission to establish a school district in 1907. Construction…
February 4, 2025 (clucking): “I feel an article coming on” “What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” There’s no way to ignore it. Even if you look the other way when you pass the refrigerated case in the supermarket or you eliminate any fast food item from consideration that includes the word…
December “Deep in December, it’s nice to remember …
Please . . . 🎵 Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! The full moon of November is commonly called the Snow Moon (though the Farmers’ Almanac likes “the Beaver Moon” — we’re going to “Leave that To Beaver”). We don’t get much snow on the flats of Southern California {see your December…
“It’s The Great Pumpkin!” Why isn’t there any pumpkin in pumpkin spice-everything? Is it lingering European frustration for not getting the treasures that Columbus set out to bring back from the fabled Orient: cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg? Why reject the hearty, earthy, sweet flavor of baked pumpkin – the American fruit (technically,…
🎵When Autumn Leaves start to fall . . . As the Earth makes a left turn to get back to the place where the New Year starts, we have a gentler season to immerse ourselves in – a time to harvest, a time to prepare, a time to watch the days shorten. We might also…
