I attended a conference recently where I sat at a table with five other people, and the young lady leading this particular session had given us all an assignment to complete. It was an exercise in communication, where we would be pairing up and taking turns speaking and listening with our partners based on the instructions provided by the facilitator via little slips of paper she passed around. My partner spoke first, with directions to explain, in detail, what her favorite

As I write this there are a lot of people, including myself, who are waiting to find out who, if anyone, will be the next Oregon State Women’s Basketball player to announce they aren’t interested in playing for the Beavers anymore. Waiting for the next Nike to drop. By the time I’m done with this we may already know the answer. Two starters have already announced they’ll be helping some other team attempt to win a national championship next season, and now one of our sharp

We’ve completed five seasons of high school football here at CPHC, and I’ve mostly been focused on being able to complete the entire 250-school gauntlet. We must be about 1/5 of the way through the list, but they keep opening new schools all the time, so I don’t know if we’ll ever reach the end. Until recently I’d never given much thought to what would happen if we didn’t get to the finish line, but now I’m beginning to wonder what that would be like. You may not be missi

Recently, I was driving around the countryside not too far from home. It was Memorial Day, and we’d picked up my dad to make the short trip to the church so we could place a few flowers on the graves of distant ancestors. I was guiding the car along one particularly unwavering stretch of road when dad, in the front passenger seat, says, apropos of nothing, “If you turn right there, you’ll come to an interesting spot. There’s no other place like it in the world, at least ac

It was early on a bright, muggy, morning as we headed north on highway 231 bound for Montgomery, Alabama. It was a straight shot into town, and we didn’t really have time to dilly-dally, but when I saw the exit for highway 239 and a place called Smut Eye, I struggled to keep from turning off and seeing what kind of place that was. Smut Eye? A few possible explanations came to mind regarding the origins of that name. In this part of the country, where many towns consist of

Though published in 1957, Jack Kerouac had actually written On The Road in 1951. For six years he tried to find someone willing to publish it, and the years of rejection caused severe depression and alcoholism. Always financially insecure, never able to settle down in one place for long, he wanted, and desperately needed, to have someone acknowledge the value of his work. Until that happened, he had to keep moving. It was his character Dean Moriarty who said the words, bu

I suppose not everyone out there is a big Kerouac fan, and that’s ok. And some people may not even know who he was, which really isn’t ok. Jack Kerouac was a writer, but not your typical, conventional, run-of-the-mill kind of writer. He was a seriously flawed man whose propensity to abuse just about any drug he could get his hands on was only one of his many faults. But he was also a very bright guy. He was a star athlete in high school and was smart enough to earn a sch

As I sat in my office on the stiff wooden chair behind my desk, the information leapt out at me like a hideous clown from a rusty, old jack-in-the box. I snuffed out my Lucky Strike on the lone remaining ice cube in my otherwise-empty glass of Johnny Walker. I don’t like smoking and drinking, but it’s part of the gig, so I do it. There it was. The first big break in my very first case: 1998. Gadzooks. That’s got to be the key. My name’s Ednold. I used to be a doctor,

It’s already February again, and that can only mean one thing. Well, that’s not true. I guess it could mean lots of things, now that I think about it. For one, that nasty-looking giant rat thing comes out of his hole in Pennsylvania and 99% of the time he sees his own shadow and makes winter last another six weeks. Stupid thing. Whose idea was it to let him decide when winter ends? Did you know they’ve been watching that dumb rodent since 1886? How long do those things

I guess I sound like a broken record by now, but let me start by repeating the fact that everything is connected somehow, at least inside my head. When Captain Tom died this month it got me thinking about him and his hit rendition of The Song That Must Not Be Named, and his record of being the oldest person to ever have a #1 hit song. Which, in turn, got me thinking about the oldest female to ever have been part of a #1 song. We have to go quite a ways back for this one.

As I mentioned in my last story, there are links to things in this world that are sometimes unexpected. Sometimes it’s just plain strange the way people and events are connected to each other. I wasn’t planning on ever mentioning the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” again in my entire life. But here I am bringing it up yet again and drawing more attention to it than it ever deserved. If you hate that damn song as much as I do, I apologize. If I could write this without men

It’s strange sometimes the way things work out; how things fit together in a way that makes you realize just how small the world is. There are things that, at first glance, have nothing in common, but you start digging a little bit and there are ties that you never suspected. Some people refer to degrees of separation, some call it interconnection, to some it's spiderweb logic. Whatever you call it, this is one of those things. Not long ago I posted a story about the Liver

I hate to start off on a negative note, but today I have a bone to pick with a certain portion of our population. I’m talking to all you scientific types out there who want us to think you’re all so smart. Decades ago I was led to believe we’d have flying cars by now. Where are they? By now, we were supposed to have conveyor belts in our homes that would take care of us. We’d stand on one end of the belt and by the time we got off at the other end we’d have been washed, d

If you get up at 4:00 or 5:00am every weekend morning and watch the games, which I’m sure you all do, you already know that Liverpool fans sing the old song “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, or YNWA as it is known, before and after each home game. It’s a tradition. A stupid tradition, but a tradition nonetheless. Why, you may wonder, do thousands of people in Liverpool sing an old tune from an American musical that premiered in 1945? Why would ultra-macho soccer fans, people fam

The year 1986 saw the release of the movie Hoosiers, about the smalltown Hickory Huskers high school basketball team that won the Indiana state championship in 1954. The movie, starring Gene Hackman as the coach who needs to redeem himself, Barbara Hershey as his antagonist/romantic interest/teacher friend, and Dennis Hopper as the dipsomaniac assistant coach, is exciting and fun to watch. I like it. Some people say it’s based on a true story, but it’s more accurate to say

When the Oregon Territory was first established in 1848, the territory encompassed an area that included the current states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, as well as parts of Wyoming and Montana, and the capital of the territory was Oregon City. By 1853, after the creation of Washington Territory, it was about half the size but still included much of Idaho and parts of Wyoming, and the capital had moved south to Salem. Since Salem is still the present-day capital of Oreg

We were somewhere around Bridal Veil on the west end of the gorge when a vague awareness of the whole situation began to take hold. I remember thinking “I should never have even answered that stupid phone.” My friend Allison is smart and she’s full of good advice, but she’s also a little on the crazy side. As far as I know she’s still wanted by Interpol for an international incident on the frontier of a small Mediterranean country back in 1998. She still claims she wasn’t

A little over a year ago I started writing little stories on this blog ostensibly centered around a weekly trip to a high school football game. Little did I know at the time that I was capturing snapshots of the final season B.V. (Before the Virus). Now, just a year later, instead of listening to pep bands as we watch high school sports, we’ve been listening to evacuation updates while watching ash fall from the sky. Instead of Bulldogs and Spartans tackling each other on

The Ednold family has had more time on their hands this summer than ever before. It’s a shame that we haven’t been able to take better advantage of it. I’ve lost track of what stage of social and economic recovery we’re in, but even if the authorities weren’t asking us to stay home, so many events have been cancelled and so many places have closed up shop for the duration of this virus that it’s been difficult to spend any meaningful time away from the house. But sooner or

With the general global shutdown of sporting events beginning in the middle of March this year, I feared that the FA Cup Final would be another casualty of the virus. The game is usually played in May, the last game before the summer break. This year it had been scheduled for May 23 before being postponed indefinitely while the powers that be decided when or if the remainder of the season should be contested. By the time play resumed in June it had been decided that the ga