Author: Richard Watson

Should be a hoot! The Tucson Festival of Books! A hundred thousand people or so milling around, looking for a good book to read. I got one! The Good Guy List! Heading back to Tucson with my captivating novel about the Joyce Twins. A good bit of GGL was written in my years in Tucson.…

St. John’s was a no brainer.  As soon as my nephew Bill suggested that we travel there for a winter break, I was all in. Total commitment. It fit the criteria of our revamped Christmas concept: Memories for gifts. No commercial gifts (or at least, fewer presents, thank you Catherine), but rather we choose to…

A good week, in review. I’m grateful that all the debates are now past. I’m grateful I came across the letter from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton upon the transition of power in the oval office in 1992. I hope for continued dignity for our country. The week brought about the finale of our…

October 15, 2016 A week of blessed memories… The weather guy on MPR (Minnesota public radio) noted the other day that there are six weeks until Thanksgiving. This, he said just after observing the frost we had on Thursday morning was the first since April, and ending the longest growing season (184 days) he had…

NFL works to project an image that sports on the field is cousin to the military. It endorses the notion that prowess on the field is akin to valor among our soldiers. In that light, it is of interest that one debates the value of sacrificing brains and bodily health to sport. The other simply…

Do we not already have a model for responsible gun ownership? We are innately driven in a quest to nurture personal power as we aim to fulfill our individual possibilities in life. Discipline refines and transforms power to its finest and strongest potential. To have power and to choose to wield it for good is…

On the eve of the election, I’m confident on how I chose to vote tomorrow. There is urgency to this election that compelled me to go beyond the criteria by which I made my election decisions in the past. How did I learn to cast ballots? In middle and high school, we are taught to…

I don’t embrace age as a number of days, bunched in years, to be the definitive measure of one’s time in life. I prefer to consider growth in maturity toward wisdom as the significant measure of age. I do, of course, observe and celebrate birthdays. Anything for a party! I respect every day on our…

Earth brings us wonders. Mushrooms. Signatures of sleeping elephants. Autumn stealing into the Northland. It is a good home, this earth. Our first crop of shrooms. We had a singular show of promise from the shitake, but our September sprouting of wine caps was sizable. The ten harvested shrooms were full, lush and heavy. They…

I’m not a historian. Nor am I an economist. So the only previous economic repression similar to our Nation’s current economy that I know anything about is the Great Depression, and I have only heard tales about those times from those who experienced it and from the teachers who taught about it in my youth.…