My Dinner With Andres

Listen, I have a $150 phone that’s several years old that I can use to take and make calls, take photos and send texts, and on a good day I can take and send a photo while texting. I sometimes can follow a link other people text to me, and on a really big day […]

Turn, Turn, Turn

This year. The trains stopped running through the Gunnison Valley well over a half-century ago, but for me, there’s been a freight train barreling through, and it’s taken everything I have to hang on. This year actually started in April 2023, when Lynn fell at work and broke the top part of her femur. They […]

Sundays With Bob

I’ve had many friends named Bob over the years; the one I’m closest to these days is having some rough sledding. He’s been battling cancer for seven years, and although he and his partner Rita are the fiercest of warriors, the cancer has refused to take “no” for answer. Time, we find, is suddenly short. […]

A Bridge Too Far

One of my many what I thought were irrational fears turns out to be much more rational than I imagined: every time I drive across the longest bridge across Blue Mesa Reservoir to the west of Gunnison, I expect it to collapse and take the vehicle I’m in with it. Well, I could say, who’s […]

Bear, With Me

Way back in 1994, I became an inaugural subscriber to Colorado Central magazine, the brainchild of Colorado’s most popular pundit ever, Ed Quillen, and his wife Martha. I even had a piece erroneously published early on — Ed heard me read an excerpt of a short story I’d written, although he thought it was non-fiction […]

The Far Side of Five Years

Eight days ago, on Nov. 15, I had every intention of marking the fifth anniversary of this blog. I started Garbanzo Beans for Breakfast — the name of my old newspaper column — just as we were starting construction (okay, we were watching others start the construction) of our house as a means of letting […]

Um . . .

I have tried meditation several times, off and on through the years, and it’s never really worked for me the way I want it to. I really wanted it to work. But sometimes — to the utter dismay, if not disdain, of the teacher — it simply puts me to sleep. And sometimes I get […]

Here’s What’s Going On

One can taste the air outside this morning in Gunnison, a chewy, smoky flavor that while we seek it on our barbecue is just not all that palatable when taken straight. This is not the burnt air of Canada, or California, or Arizona or even points west in Colorado — this is local smoke. The […]

Wild, Wild Life

It’s June, and I’m still unhooking hoses after each use to ensure we don’t end up with frozen pipes. I’m sure this seems like an exaggeration and it would to me, too, had I not consulted Lynn’s weather in May to get a projected overnight low of 37F, only to go out the next morning […]

The Ayes of Texas

Hey, Gunnison County made it into a national news story! Only tangentially, you understand, but for a new moment we are a footnote of notoriety in a firehose of sewage seeping out of the crazy state that Texas has become. Ah, Texas. The oily secretion that butters our bread here in Gunnison County. We here […]