A promise of fading light and cooling mercury…
Read MoreI took great pleasure banning the the rest of the world…
Read MoreWhen I think of Vegemite, I think of Japan—Tokyo specifically. When I first started working in Japan, about half of my co-workers were from Australia…
Read MoreMarch 11, 2011. Just an ordinary day. Then earth fell away beneath us…
Read MoreYou pour your heart out. List your every reason, incident and rebuke. And still my little boat has not swamped and floundered. But now my shoes are wet and my socks are falling down in water weight…
Read MoreOn the silted shores of that Kashmiri lake from my childhood - my shoes slowly ruining in the slush of snow, mud and plum blossoms - I stood beside the houseboat we were staying in (which once hosted Henry Kissinger). That was the month Indira Gandhi was voted out and my whole family got stuck in India.
Read MoreIt was about half an hour in, and most of the attendees are comfortably settled into the conversation. It is the right time to hurl a brick through a stained glass window during a funeral. “I was thinking of boiling a tongue today for dinner...”
Read MoreIt’s a tea towel. Why apologize?
Read MoreI was not sure if it was the copious amount of powdered drink mixes I was buying, or the scandalous amounts of deodorant, followed by the plethora of toothpaste tubes rattling on the conveyor belt to the scanner in their crisp cardboard boxes—but it must have been eye catching...
Read More“There, far away in the mountains of the Chugak, where birds fly over on their way north to the land of white night, there was a couple walking below.” You see the knife draw two stick figures below with dots to show foot prints. “They will hunt and gather.” You see a river and flecks that look like fish in the water.
Read MoreThe rest of preflight runs pretty smoothly. Our passengers are happy and in good moods. They want to get the plane up and to their tropical destination as soon as possible...
Read MoreThe second or third day after the earthquake, I sat in my apartment and realized the training my family and I did in Germany was no different from the onboard aircraft evacuation training I went through over the years. "Take nothing that will slow you down. Run, run far and don't look back..."
Read MoreIt was just after Nagano was chosen for the winter olympics that I suddenly was Mr. Popular. Did I have a spare bedroom? Could I show people around? “Paul, let’s talk after the reunion.” I left before the introductions were even made. That was the end of my high school connections...
Read MoreMy family and my blood are in Alaska. My heart will hold up north and I fool no one. But my also “family” exists as much to me down in Texas and California, Washington and Tokyo...
Read MoreMy passports have always been issued from abroad. In the 1980s my passports were changed to blue "Z" instead of the standard blue. I was treated like a second class citizen each time I “returned” to the US and travelling in my 20's through Europe with it in the Cold War was sheer hell on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain...
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