mostly nonfiction and bakersfield news | January 1st, 2009
Welcoming the New Year, Remembering It Forty Years Ago
Writing on New Year’s Eve 2008 about what 2009 might hold in store for us, I suddenly realized: today is the last day to write about the 40th anniversary of the world-changing events of 1968, a year we now realize was a huge tear in time, a year when the world’s past and future truly [...]
Doña Leona
Like other very humble people I met when I was growing up, Doña Leona lived with her husband, an elderly couple, in a one-room wooden shack on a slope covered by thick, tall vegetation. The hut was on a small clearing in what for us children seem impenetrable jungle; usually all we could see was [...]
Ya Se Va La Rama: A Winter Christmas Tale
I grew up in a town where the winter was about a week long, though heralded early and prolongued for months by the absence of mosquitoes, an odd time when we witnessed the spontaneous appearances of sapos (frogs) and cangrejos (crabs) everywhere).
None of us kids swam then on the beaches, rivers, and swamps that surrounded [...]
