Baby Frogs

At school the lawn banks toward a shady northern wall by a sprinkler oozing puddles where every spring male frogs mount female backs and fertilize eggs as they’re laid in water. We never notice the tadpoles that first emerge but are delighted by the sudden appearance of hundreds of baby frogs. Initially they’re fingertip-size and…

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Travel Advice

Avoid crowded and dangerous Mexico City, stay way from torrid beaches, ignore over-hyped pyramids, and forget boring cathedrals. Instead, come to San Juan in infernal yet enchanting Nuevo León. Here you’ll meet friendly and forthright people. Don’t worry about forty-nine headless corpses on highway under welcoming white arch. Everything’s been cleaned up, and narcotics traffickers…

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Good News for Jesus at the Bakersfield Islamic Conference

At the sixth annual Bakersfield Islamic Conference, before a few hundred attendees in a hotel ballroom, crew-cut Joshua Evans, looking scholarly behind a long brown beard and matching brown glasses, delivered this information: you cannot be a Muslim unless you believe in Jesus, one of five great Prophets who brought about seminal changes. Islam also…

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Big Sneeze

After hosting amorous boyfriend Sunday night and pounding treadmill half hour early Monday morning, popular high school math teacher Martha H drove to school, parked car, and walked toward class, confident she’d have another great week. She sneezed after shutting car door, and nose and sinuses had tickly, cleaned out feeling that became more pleasurable…

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Maris Prime Rib

In mid-sixties Sacramento a restaurateur, exhibiting either grand generosity or manifest ignorance of human hunger, offered eat all you want prime rib lunch on Sundays. Two fast-growing adolescents and I, salivating after a hot afternoon of schoolyard baseball, scurried into an establishment that, a few years earlier, had presented Roger Maris the baseball he hit…

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