SANTA CRUZ, CA-

This is from a series of images that I think of as my parents’ wedding pictures, although they didn’t have a wedding. They were married at the courthouse by a justice of the peace in December 1965. My father was twenty-three going on twenty-four. My mother was nineteen.

They met in Iowa City, where my father had grown up. My mother was an art major at the university. She was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced snick), when my father came as a guest speaker to talk about his experiences registering black voters in Mississippi. He was there in 1964, when the events that became the basis for the movie Mississippi Burning unfolded. Three civil rights workers were killed.

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SANTA CRUZ, CA-

When Star Wars came out when I was eight, I had friends who lived across the street from George Lucas. To me, it was like they lived across the street from God, if God looked like someone’s dad, bearded and bushy-haired in a plaid flannel shirt, puttering around on his deck. Later that year I moved to a new town, one immortalized in another George Lucas film, American Graffiti.

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SAN QUENTIN, CA- 

Johnny Cash performed at San Quentin in 1969. The album was released later that year in June. In July we walked on the moon. My parents were sure the moon landing was fake, so they didn’t bother watching it on TV. In August the Manson Family went on a killing spree and Richie Havens opened Woodstock with the song “Freedom.” I was born that fall. 

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SAN QUENTIN, CA-

Steve, a friend of my mother’s, has been teaching a class on non-violent communication at San Quentin for the past five years. When my mother mentioned that I worked on a book called Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, Steve asked me if I’d like to come observe his class. (more…)

FLORENCE, MA-

There were pies: Boston cream, banana cream, orange-pineapple cream, strawberry rhubarb, and apple. There was the Miss Flo-reo pie on Wednesdays, usually; there was key lime. Ah yes—she breathed in the deep oceanic smell of Baked Scrod Today whilst she stood waiting for a booth to be wiped clean; and she watched Ina, stoop-shouldered by her years, thirty-seven years waiting tables here; and Ina’s sturdy hands among the dark red ketchup bottles; balancing bottles one on top of the other, mouth to mouth; and ketchup bled, slowly, down the sides, mating with ketchup below. (more…)

SANTA CRUZ, CA-

On June 3, 2007, two thousand naked people gathered to be photographed at a parking garage in Amsterdam.

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SANTA CRUZ, CA-

Last weekend two friends of mine celebrated their 40th birthdays at Cal Skate.

When I was in elementary school and junior high everybody had roller-skating birthday parties at Cal Skate.

Roller skating was ubiquitous in the late ’70s/early ’80s.

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SANTA CRUZ, CA-

A friend of mine recently suggested that I write a blog about this phenomenon:

Truck Balls. Truck Nuts. Truck Testicles.

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SANTA CRUZ, CA-

I went to see the movie Blades of Glory on opening weekend.

I’m not really a fan of Will Ferrell or Jon Heder. But I am a fan of figure skating.

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SANTA CRUZ, CA-

I once took a class with Kurt Vonnegut, who told me I’d never make a living as a writer.  He told me I’d always be poor, all writers are poor.

He also told me that a character in one of my stories needed to fall in love with her doctor.  He compared the doctor/patient relationship to the relationships among soldiers in foxholes on the frontlines of battle.  He said he fell in love with his fellow soldiers. (more…)