The game of chess no longer carries the prestige it did when our uncle taught my older brother and me to play when we were still in grade school. I still don’t know where my uncle learned to play. Nobody else in the family knew how. And I can’t imagine that he learned it at …
I’m not easily embarrassed. But, lately, a number of my house guests have commented that my guest room décor is “Bordello-Chic.” Apparently this is because there are beaded curtains hanging in all the doorways and windows in that room. It seems that beaded curtains have gotten a bad rap over the years. They have been …
DNA genealogy testing has become all the rage. One of the biggest companies conducting this testing has more than 20 million people in its database. Sad to say, I may be one of them. It turns out that I participated in a DNA research project back in 2006, long before today’s consumer genealogy companies were …
Everybody knows that in Mexico, around Christmastime, the local parishes reenact the Posada. A procession of school children follow Joseph and Mary as they go from door to door in search of a place to spend the night. Ultimately, they end up in a stable. And the rest is history. Most people down here are …
Larry Kolchak shares his philosophies on what it means to catch a falling star.
Larry Kolzac tickles us with the dilemmas of telephonic communication in our younger days at Lakeside.
A long with the summer solstice, there comes another season in Ajijic. The fly season. You can tell it has arrived because everywhere you look people are doing the Australian salute—swishing flies away from their faces. So far, I haven’t seen anybody with wine corks dangling from his hat brim, but it’s still early in …
I never had a horse. My wife, who grew up on an acreage in Iowa, had six of them over the years. I grew up in Chicago. The only horse I ever got close enough to actually touch was hitched to a fruit peddler’s wagon in the old Polish neighborhood. Not exactly a “Hi-Ho-Silver” experience. …
A couple of months ago, I went back to California to get vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine. In Mexico, I had been given the Chinese (Sinovac) vaccine, but that was eight months earlier, and it didn’t have all that great an effectiveness rating. Many European countries were not accepting it for entry, and I was …
A few years ago, my wife and I took a trip to Guatemala. It was more like a pilgrimage. It was during Holy Week.
