Golden State

Dearest Family and Friends, If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your younger self? It’s an evocative question, but flip the words around and it becomes even more compelling: If your younger self could see you now, what advice would he give you? My fourteen-year-old self has been talking to me of late. Of course, he doesn’t give me advice directly. Instead, he placed a particular memory in my seventy-year-old consciousness and I have to figure out why it's there and what it means.  My memory dates from 1969, when my father took a sabbatical in Berkeley California, the city in which I live today. It was a challenging year for me. I exchanged my cozy Ohio college town — where I knew all the streets and could ride my bicycle till sundown — for an unfamiliar and unruly metropolis. The enormous UC Berkeley campus was on edge, and so was I. Daily protests about the Vietnam war devolved into riots. Barricades were set ablaze and police used tear gas to disperse protest...

Dearest Family and Friends, December draws to a close, and with it my aspirations for 2025. I didn’t lose the weight I had hoped to lose; I will drag seven unwanted pounds into the new year unless the basal metabolism fairy pays me a surprise visit in the next few days. I didn’t become enlightened either. Becoming enlightened during 2025 was my stretch goal and I wasn't even close. Too much desire and too little kindness. I should be thankful I wasn’t done away with entirely and reincarnated as a hungry ghost or a toaster oven. I will reuse those two resolutions next year; they are untouched and good as new. I am checking off one promise I made to myself last January — take a challenging class. For me, this will be group yoga, a stretch goal of a different sort. In fact, I just entered a large exercise room where my class is about to begin. The room is part of the fitness facility attached to Berkeley’s historic Claremont Hotel, three blocks from my home. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors c...

Dearest Family and Friends, It is a new day! It is a new day in an old body. It is a new day in an old body that is tentatively lacing up a pair of boots for a second day of hiking. I already see the beginning of a blister on the outside of my left great toe, an unhappy creature carried forward from yesterday’s hike. I will tend to that later. Marcia and I are walking the Portuguese Camino, reserving five days to hike the littoral route from Porto up to Caminha at the Spanish border. “Littoral” means “near the shore” — literally — and yesterday we kept the Atlantic Ocean no further than a hundred yards over our left shoulders. As we walked we heard waves thrashing the black rocky coast and breathed thick salt mist and saw impertinent gulls trying to wrest sardines from one another’s beaks in midair. We met a few Germans and a young couple from London, and for a short stretch a goat accompanied us, but mostly we walked on our own. Marcia planned our route with the help of ChatGPT, which...

Dearest Family and Friends, Children in the backseat quickly forget there is an adult driving the automobile. Car trips are a terrific opportunity to hear young people’s unfiltered thoughts. In California, you might hear a backseat conversation such as this: Vivian (our seven year old grandchild, to her twin sister, Irene): “What’s your life source, Renee?” Irene: “I feel a deep connection to jump rope.” Vivian: “I think jump rope is my life source too.” What is your life source? My wife Marcia’s life source turns out to be glucose. I don’t mean glucose as a source of life’s energy — the fuel for cellular respiration. Marcia’s life source is knowing her glucose level — the number — as measured by her new continuous glucose monitor (CGM), a white dime-sized device she wears on the back of her arm under an adhesive patch. Marcia’s continuous glucose monitor measures the glucose concentration in her body tissue fluid and transmits the result to her phone, refreshing its output every minut...

Dearest Family and Friends, Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can’t go home again, but Marcia and I did just that a few weeks ago and spent time with a succession of our Ann Arbor friends over the course of a four day visit. Saturday morning found us at the Achilles Diner on Packard Street with Pat, the woman who started caring for our daughters when they were five and eight and kept at it all the way through their high school graduations. A tattooed waitress served us coffee and pancakes while Pat served up stories from her colorful life. “The Lord wants us to tell our stories,” Pat told us. “That’s what He wants us to do.”  I will tell you one of my stories, but telling stories isn’t easy to do because my story — my truth — is personal and elusive and when I put my story into words I won’t capture it precisely or completely. I will write an approximation of my truth. And to compound errors, when you — my reader — read my words you will inevitably fill the gaps in my writing with your o...