April 2024

Robert D Lopez Profesor emeritus, California State University Sacramento I have dedicated 45 years to my beloved field of education. I have served as faculty, counseling psychologist, teacher, coach, athletic director, mentor and friend. I enjoy travel, sports, music, arts, literature and writing poetry and songs. My poetry books “Eggs Benedict,”and “Seasons of Thoughts” and […]

We retrieved a large folder of watercolors from the back of Josefina’s SUV and proceeded to the Chapala malecón. Being a Sunday, the lakeside promenade was teeming with tapatíos, weekend visitors from Guadalajara. After finding a shaded bench, we began to leaf through Josefina’s impressive work. In Mexico, as in much of Latin America, roving

Though I met my husband, Jonathan, 50 years ago, we didn’t marry until 20 years later. It was all very messy. Not only did I have a first husband, but later Jonathan had a first wife, They were marriages about which we were both serious, and in which we were both unhappy, and all the

The drive from Lake Charles, Louisiana to DeRidder, Louisiana is only forty-five minutes long. When I was a child, it seemed to take hours. Farm fences displayed brightly colored ads for Brylcreem hair pomade and Barbasol shaving cream. The colorful signs provided a break in the monotony for our carload of restless children, as the

Commonly Mispronounced/Misused English Words Repetition is a powerful device. When we repeat something enough times, it becomes habitual. This goes for our lifestyle choices, such as when and whether we exercise, how we keep abreast of the day’s news, or how and where we seek entertainment and relaxation. While many of these habits are repeated

Juanita and Carlos had married young; she was eighteen and he had just turned nineteen. They lived on a very limited income those first few years until Carlos secured a job as a full-time gardener for several families in Chapala. From his early years, he had loved flowers, loved working with the soil of his

Porfirio Díaz To borrow from Charles Dickens: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was a period of peace and progress; it was a period of oppression and misery. It was an era of immense change; it was an era of stubborn retrenchment. He was a man of immense

The actual name is the “torsollini,” but we have come to know it as the “tortellini” pasta shape. Many legends lay claim to the origins of this pasta shape, but all involve a beautiful Italian girl. A strong local tradition has it in the province of Modena this pasta was born in the tiny village of Castelfranco

Pollination Considering that about 80% of our flowering plants need to be pollinated so they can reproduce and that these plants include approximately 75% of the crops people harvest and eat around the world, how would you solve the dilemma of pollination? Some plants are pollinated by animals known as pollinators. Pollination is the act of taking pollen from

Tepehua then and now, opportunity knocking at the barrio door… High on the hillside that’s visible westward from Chapala’s plaza, sit a number of barrios. San Miguel is the closest, most notably accessible from the brightly painted Quetzalcoatl steps next to the Surtidor market on Francisco Madero, and so named by the presence of Iglesia