I grew up in Upland, in the suburbs east of Los Angeles, in the foothills beneath Cucamonga Peak. Southern California’s storms this week have been a pleasant reminder of my childhood. A little cross referencing of family memory and old weather records pinned it down to January of 1969. It was my sister Lisa’s 12th …
The tail end of 2009 has frankly been pretty crappy in the Heineman-Fleck household. My car battery died, and some other stuff I won’t burden y’all with. The net is that the Christmas tree we bought two weeks ago is still sitting in the backyard, where we placed it fully intending to bring it in …
Continue reading ‘Holiday ’09 and the Magic of Cell Phones’ »
Dad watches birds Originally uploaded by Nora Heineman-Fleck. Photo courtesy Nora Heineman-Fleck, of me in the backyard geeking on a bird. As an aside, I was wearing my City Lights Bookstore t-shirt when Nora took this Saturday. Nora, by a coincidence, was also wearing hers. Probably just dumb luck, but I like the mystery of …
Don DeLillo has a great line in “Underwold” describing how, at a night baseball game, under the lights, “the players seem completely separate from the night around them.” Something in excess of a quarter of a century ago, Lissa and I went to baseball games while we were falling in love, and we’ve been going …
My newspaper column today, an expansion of something I wrote several years ago, on what happens when you don’t have health insurance (sub. or ad or something req.): Consider this, published by a team of U.S. health care researchers in 2004: “Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United …
Utah State Route 95 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I know that as a 21st century westerner of a certain sort, I’m meant by religious tradition to abhor Utah State Route 95. But dang if it isn’t about the most beautiful highway I’ve ever had the pleasure to drive. Go south a bit, then west out …
Continue reading ‘Notes from the Road: Utah State Route 95’ »
Horses Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Hi Mom (and everyone else) – Walking down the Stromkajen today, across the water from the Royal Palace, I saw this squadron of the king’s guards riding from the palace into town. A site to behold – elegant horses, regal martial attire, really quite lovely. To the right of where …
Kafkaesque Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. When I was a senior in high school, some friends and I had a campus club that, among other wholesome activities, held a Franz Kafka Lookalike contest. I won, though the results were always a bit suspect. (We had no picture of Kafka, and thus had no idea what he …
It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in August, 1990, that Lissa and I saw our first baseball game in Albuquerque. We had flown in on an apartment-hunting trip before our move, and once we had things nailed down, we headed out to the ballpark to catch a game. We both grew up in LA, as …
Free iris Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. If the price is right…. Lissa put 16 bags of iris out by the curb Friday. Two left this morning (Sunday.)