(Grandpa Jim & Uncle Jimmy, early 1920s) 

Grandpa Jim Menaul was born in County Armagh, of a fiercely Presbyterian family with a French name who claimed distant kinship with the Stewarts.  He possessed the Irish brogue, along with the charm and ability with a good story. M/… Read full post »

When I was a baby troop on my first overseas tour, at Misawa AB in Japan, I had a regular date in the form  of  guy that Jenny bequeathed to me. Jenny was my friend simply because we were the only two women in the barracks who worked shifts. She… Read full post »

(The view from my door, towards POL Gate, Misaway AB 1980)

Twenty-five-plus years ago, the "R" housing area was a scattering  of tiny, flimsy houses and makeshift apartment buildings cobbled out of old two-story barrack buildings, straggled among fields of rice and marsh gra/… Read full post »

Helene M. and her husband John were long-time friends of Moms’ from church, the church that we went to in Beverly Hills during the late 60s, a congregation full of movie people and European emigres in a mock-Tudor building full of elaborate stained glass. Everyone called her Lanie, an/… Read full post »

And some things which should not have been forgotten....

Have not been, because they are either funny or excellent cautionary tales. The Teflon Man, for instance: he bestrode the small world of military broadcasting, providing a rich legacy of horrible gaffes, cringe-inducing mis… Read full post »

It’s an old-fashioned study in contrasts, to look at the two of them, Abraham Lincoln and Sam Houston; both political giants, both of them a linchpin around which a certain point of American history turned, both of them men of the frontier. The similarities continue from that point: both of the… Read full post »

(Me, Sander, JP, Mom and Pippy, 1966)

In a household with a father who is a research biologist and tends to bring work home, and a mother given to adventurous essays into whatever is cheap and plentiful at the co-op, the deep-freeze is liable to contain some… Read full post »

(JP and I,  around 1963)

(The house, in winter 1992)

I had no idea who had lived in the house before. I found it by accident, taking a shortcut between two housing listings in South Ogden, one of which proved to have been rented by the time I got to it, and the other which… Read full post »

"You are fed on curious things, but I am fed on proper meat... you must live beyond the foam, but I am safe and live at home..."

The line from Child's Garden of Verses never came truer, than during the Bicentennial summer of 1976, when  my younger brother  and sister,… Read full post »

 (Orange Groves and the Mountains) 

I have a shoebox full of vintage postcards, collected in the Thirties by the invalid young son of Grandpa Jim’s employer. Among my favorite cards are those of places I knew, like the Devil’s Gate Dam, on the nebulous bord… Read full post »

(Marsh, Misawa AB 1978) 

At my first duty station, at FEN-Misawa, I worked a lot of night shifts. Although the women’s barracks were only a brisk twenty-minute walk from the station, and Misawa AB was a fairly couth place, in those dear long-lost days when it w… Read full post »

I have always had the sneaking feeling that circumstances peculiar to the Western frontier significantly enabled the successful American struggle for female suffrage. The strangling hand of Victorian standards for feminine conduct and propriety, which firmly insisted that “ladies were not suppo… Read full post »

On a mild spring day, my daughter and I walk on a narrow trail, trampled out between tall grass and wildflowers grown knee-high, waist-high, shoulder-high. A light breeze ruffles the flowers, around which orbit a fair of butterflies. We are on a quest, looking for the past, and exploring the ruins… Read full post »

I have been flipping over the pages of my battered Hallwag Euro-Guide, attempting to reconstruct my hopscotch itinerary on little back roads across France, at the wheel of the VEV in the early autumn of 1985. I avoided the big cities, before and after Paris, and the major highways. For a… Read full post »

My dearest daugher, known as Blondie, for the exceedingly fair color of her hair,  first raised the subject by asking, in that deliberately casual way that teenagers have of raising that issue that is of supreme importance to them:
"Mom... do you think I could make it through Marine Corps basic t/… Read full post »