Home is the Sailor from the Sea: the Hunter From the Hill

This is my neice Dana making noodles with her host mother during her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan. Following her service in the Peace Corps, she became a military officer and has just returned from Central Asia again where she completed a very different tour of duty in Afghanistan.

There has been so much news on the Afghan front these past few months—skirmishes at Afghan’s border with Pakistan, policemen running amok and shooting Allied soldiers, heroes going home for the last time—my family and I have been on edge about our family member serving there. Lt. Dana (we don’t use her last name here) has been at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan since July and though we’ve been proud of her service we’ve been worried every single day for her safety.

Today she arrived back in the U.S.A. Though her mother and I were there to see her off and watch her plane push back in July, she didn’t want us there today. She wants to have a few days on her own to get back into all the wonderful and mundane activities of American life: get her cell phone turned back on, get a jump for her dead car battery, pick up her dog, Tupelo, and order pizza delivered to her front door. Ah the wonders of the normal world.

She’s been living in a place where there were frequent services on base for fallen heroes. Where she often heard rounds fired in anger just outside the walls of the compound. Where she worked eighteen hour days knowing each thing she did might mean safety or danger for a comrade. The fact that she had to put reconstituted goat’s milk on her cereal, and that the latrines were without frills paled in comparison to the life and death decisions she had to make. She lived in a world of almost constant night, working eighteen hour days on Zulu time. Where intelligence agents kept their eye on her as she worked out at the gym and where rare moments of laughter came watching American cartoons translated into Farsi and captioned in fractured English.

It has continued to trouble me that we send our young men and women into harm’s way overseas without making any sacrifice of our own at home. What has anyone in America done to support these young people who are working to keep us safe from another September 11th? I would like to see our next president stand up and give each and every one of us a responsibility that will in some way serve as a reminder of what these volunteers are doing.

But for today I can celebrate. Our officer has come home safe and sound. God bless her, and God bless this great nation.
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How Honest Can You Be With an Elderly Parent Who is Ill?

My father is an amazing gardener as he shows in 1998 with his pumpkin crop. He was always hoping he would get one big enough to enter in the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Contest.

My sister and me (I'm in front, she's behind me) and our neighbor Peggy (behind my sister) dressed for Halloween back in those long ago days. It was always cold in the evening in California in October, so we had on several layers of clothes.

My father is so much on my mind this time of year. When we were children, he always walked with us as we went from house to house on Halloween Night. He enjoyed the night--and the candy--as much as we did, and even in the days before parents worried about the safety of their children (the way they do today) it would not have occured to him to to let his little ones wander about of a fall evening without his loving care. One year when I was very small, he walked with us on crutches. He had stepped on a curb in San Francisco, where he worked at an engineering firm, and broke his foot. What a nice guy he was to walk us around even when he had a cast on his foot. And now we care for him. Click on the headline for my blog about honesty and disease and how my sister and I have determined how to handle the truth in a loving way.

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What Was She Thinking?

She looks as if she's having fun ...
But all the while she wants to run ...

She hopes no one she knows will spot her ...

And then she finds she's in hot water!

Just because you are young and in the public eye and someone asks you to be in a dunk tank for a charity event, doesn't mean you have to agree to do it. But Robin, when she was young, was always trying to make everybody happy and wanted everyone to like her. Thus, when someone made this request to her, she said yes. Worse yet, someone was there with a camera to record the event. And even worse, she saved the pictures. And possibly even worse than that, she now offers them up here on her blog. But she does so as a lesson. Trying to please everybody in the world is impossible. If you are in the public eye and you want to please everyone you may end up looking a little silly (see the above pictures.) If you want to help out a charity, think about it long and hard, and then, instead of doing something like this, write the charity a check and wish them well. Robin thinks these pictures will prevent her from becoming President of the United States, but considering how silly the candidates have been this year, we don't think a little indiscretion like this one will do it.

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Rita Hayworth: Movie Star and Victim

Margarita Carmen Cansino was born in 1918, two years before the U.S. Congress ratified the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that allowed women to vote in national elections. Her father was from Spain and her mother a dancer in the Ziegfield Follies. Her "foreign" heritage was not an advantage during her years in film and when she was put under contract to Columbia studios they lightened her dark tresses to auburn and shed her Latin name, changing it to Rita Hayworth.

She was a girl who never had time to finish school and who was drafted to dance with her father in Tijuana dives at the age of twelve. Insecure and shy, uneducated and easily manipulated she was continually used by men who saw only her sex appeal and beauty and none of the vulnerability the lie beneath the surface.

Like so many Hollywood women of her era, the very stardom she sought became a curse she alternately clung to and tried to shed.

When she died in the care of her daughter Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, at the age of 68, the fawning lovers and users were gone. But in one of the many ironies of life, her death from Alzheimer's was the beginning of a new awareness of this terrible disease. Her daughter Yasmin took up the cause. Click on the headline above for my blog on how this victim and star left a legacy of which she could be very proud.

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John McCain, Fighter Pilot, Finally Showed up for Presidential Debate Number Three

"I am not George Bush. If you wanted to run against George Bush you should have run four years ago."
" Joe the Plumber: I've got news for you. According to Obama's tax plan, you're a rich man."
(For my full blog on the debate, click the headline.)

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Write a Book, Save a Bank: All in a Day's Work for this Forgotten Writer

Writer Irving Bacheller on the grounds of his Florida estate, which he called "Gate o' the Isles." It included fifty acres and the house overlooked a lake, so there was lots of room for his dog to enjoy.


Bacheller was a kind man who served on many boards and always gave an autograph when requested.


A photo portrait of Bacheller for the back cover of one of his books.


Bacheller's home became a tourist attraction and was on numerous postcards sold in Florida.


This photo shows tourists paddling to get a better look of Bacheller's house, which you can spot in the distance by it distinctive roof.

(Click on the headline at the top, to read today's blog about how Bacheller and a friend saved a Florida bank during the last big economic crisis.)
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Thoughts about a Duchess and a Princess on Columbus Day

We’re having a holiday in America in honor of Christopher Columbus today, a nice relief from all the bad economic news since all the banks and most of the markets are closed. For my part I went to see a new movie called The Duchess, a British film about the 18th century beauty Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, 5th Duchess of Devonshire. Her story has some parallels to the story of Lady Diana Spencer, the late Princess of Wales, since there were three people (frequently more than that) in Georgiana’s marriage to the Duke, just as there were in Diana’s marriage to Charles, Prince of Wales. The coincidences in their lives are a bit eerie since Diana Spencer is actually a distant relation of Georgiana’s through Georgina’s brother, the 2nd Earl Spencer.

The movie stars Keira Knightley as the Duchess and Ralph Fiennes as her thoroughly unpleasant husband. Ever since Fiennes played the Nazi death camp administrator in Schindler’s List he’s been especially good at making my skin crawl. This time he made his impact by doing and saying thoroughly reprehensible things using that peculiarly English manner of registering no emotion on his face whatsoever, whether he was feeding a dog or violating a woman. Keira Knightly is gorgeous and was excellent in the part, and the clothes were really something to see. I also enjoyed Charlotte Rampling, another legendary beauty, as Georgiana’s mother. But I must say it was a bleak story. Perhaps more so because one can see that even though the story in this film took place in the 18th century, two hundred years later the peers of the realm are still behaving badly towards their women, as Diana, Princess of Wales, could attest if she had lived.

I was lucky to cover Diana during her one official visit to Washington in the 1980s. She was at the height of her fame, still married to Charles, Prince of Wales, and only the insiders knew then that the marriage was a sham. Seeing her in person at a tea the British Embassy in Washington gave for a small group of reporters covering her, I was struck by how much taller she was than I had thought, how much thinner, and by how unhappy she looked. I assumed at the time she was tired, what with two small children and jet lag. But we later learned the truth—that she had good reason to be unhappy. That same weekend, she danced at the White House with John Travolta and I often remember it now—how for that that short moment she did laugh with joy. She was beautiful, visiting the Reagan White House, and dancing with a star who was really good on the dance floor. Pretty nice.

But the new film and the old story of Diana also remind me why we don’t use titles in America—they were outlawed by our founding fathers, God bless them. We’re a meritocracy and though we love reading about the bad behavior of the royals in other countries we like the idea in America that you are not what you are born to, but what you raise yourself up to be. I wish Diana Spencer, and her ancestor Georgiana Spencer had both been born to a better world. (For more pictures of Diana's visit to Washington D.C.
(Click on the title of this piece and visit my other blog.)
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About My Dad

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