• Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Top 10 Lessons I Learned Teaching My Daughter to Drive

    December 3, 2014 - By 

    So my daughter got her driver’s license today after many months of practice. (You can find reflections on that practice in a post from last March here.) In recent weeks, with the basics well in hand, I have placed a heavy emphasis on the finer points of the enterprise, and, considering all the verve and occasional vituperation of her teenagehood, she has been a rather surprisingly dutiful student. We might consider these last weeks before Exam Day a kind of Dad’s Finishing School To Become a Truly Excellent Driver (and Person). The other point sinking in here is more for…

  • Personal Reflections

    Irreplaceable You: The Life-Changing Loss of Our Beloveds

    November 30, 2014 - By 

    A year ago October, I wrote a post on “Life Changers: The Six Kinds of Experience That Blow Your Mind to Bits.” It included a proviso that the six I mentioned—travel, the arts, love, sex, mood-altering substances and children—were hardly an exhaustive list. Which became clearer almost immediately as I hit the “Publish” button, already regretting I had not made it seven items. How could I discuss life-altering experiences that shake us to our core without mentioning death? Don’t worry—I won’t compete here in either length or breadth with the entire libraries devoted to the topic from learned battalions of philosophers,…

  • Odds & Ends - Poetry - Poetry by Andrew Hidas

    Thanksgiving Poem

    November 27, 2014 - By 

    THANKS GREAT AND SMALL By Andrew Hidas For the Mystery, the X, the source of comfort and question (and cruelty) and eternal longing and love— Thanks. For the leaf flutter, the ant scurry, the slant of light on my chair, this chair, at precisely 5:01 (and 31.6 seconds) on the afternoon of November 9th, never seen again through all the warp and woof of futures unknown— Thanks. For these friends and that food, the drinks to pair, the touch of care, the earth so fair— Thanks. For this branch of that tree, for birds in the air, a bridge crossing…

  • A Meditation on Hope
    Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    A Meditation on Hope

    November 23, 2014 - By 

    My newest crusade is to have the cleanest, most litter-free potter’s field in the world sprawled in front of me on my morning walks through the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery, not one candy wrapper, cigarette butt or beer bottle surviving the sweep of my gaze as I traverse its hills and dales. My eyes are mine sweepers, extending 180 degrees through the harbor, left, right, back, up and forth. My mission: to find and emerge triumphant over every litter bomb, no matter how tiny it is or clever its attempts to hide behind a bush or under mounds of dead…

  • Personal Reflections - Politics/Culture - Religion

    Cries for Freedom: The Berlin Wall and Brittany Maynard

    November 15, 2014 - By 

    I don’t believe I know one person in my everyday orbit who has even one shred of doubt that Brittany Maynard wasn’t fully entitled to the self-determination she employed on November 1 as she ended her own life under Oregon’s Death With Dignity law. At a heartbreaking 29 years old, she was making a clear, rational, and yes, spiritually mature decision to end her life on her own terms, in her own time, before the ravages of the inoperable brain tumor she had endured overcame her ability to make any decisions or make any sense whatsoever. Let me be clear:…