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

You may not be able to tell from my present circumstances, but I won the lottery once a long time ago. Really. Well, not THE lottery, but A lottery. My boss, Stan, had told me and my friend that he was hoping to run the New York Marathon that year and wanted to know if we wanted to run it too. We were young and apparently not thinking clearly, so… Would we like to run 26 miles just for the fun of it? Of course, we would! The only catch, he informed us, was that there wa

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

Groucho Marx and I never had much in common, as far as I can tell, except that, as he did, I have an aversion to joining any club that would have me as a member. Or any other club, for that matter. But lately I’ve been contemplating submitting my application for club membership. For just $25 a year I can receive 4 newsletters, updates on member achievements, become eligible for club recognition and awards, and the privilege of voting for the Board of Directors. The Highp

According to Hideko Tamura Snider, August 6, 1945 was “the happiest morning”. It was sunny and beautiful. The previous day Snider and her best friend Miyoshi had convinced their mothers to let them return to the Japanese city of Hiroshima from a mountain village where they had gone to avoid potential air raids from Allied forces in World War II. Hideko awoke to that exquisite morning and couldn’t wait to see her friend and spend the entire day playing again. Then at 8:15a

It was the first week of September and I was sitting with my brother in the back seat of our Mustang, with our parents up front. Dad was behind the wheel and we were towing a U-Haul trailer full of stuff for our move to Palo Alto, and a new residence in sunny California was awaiting us. I don’t remember a lot about that long-ago trip, but now I wish I had paid a little more attention. If I had, I may have noticed the distinctly unattractive automobile traveling by us in th

The following are some curious conversations you may have overheard if you had attended Ednold's most recent party. Scene: Ednold’s house, where there’s a party raging inside. There’s a knock on the door and Ednold answers it. Ednold: Welcome! Come right in. So glad you could make it, Leonne. Happy New Year! Wow, I love that coat! Who designed that? Leonne: The coat? D’Ivoire, I believe. Just like you, Ednold: Nothing but the top of the Walmart line! Ednold: Here, ha

Somewhere on a college campus in Forest Grove, Oregon there is a plaque with my name on it. It used to hang in the basement of Walter Hall, but that was a long time ago and I’m not sure where it might be now. That’s right; the name Ednold is engraved on a plaque. At our annual end-of-year ceremony I was named the Best Athlete of Gamma Sigma fraternity for that year. Don’t ask what year. Like I said, it was a long time ago. I’m pretty sure it was my reward for being the

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,

The story you are about to read is true. None of the names have been changed because the only innocent one was me (you might say foolish or idiotic, but I prefer innocent) and you already know my name so I didn’t see any point in changing it. You are about to get a short glimpse into one episode from my childhood. Why? I don’t know. It’s just one of those kooky things that I’ve never forgotten and I thought you might find it entertaining to hear how innocent (or foolis

I have a friend who’s a little younger than I am, who was telling me about how everyone in their grade school class would hurry to finish their work so that they could go to the back of the room and play the Oregon Trail game on the computers. This friend was talking about this as if it were a common experience for everyone who’s ever been in grade school. It’s not. Some of us didn’t get in on the classroom video game thing. I thought about playing along and pretending I

It’s been a while, but I haven’t forgotten. When I wrote the first part of this story a year ago I was planning on a timely follow-up. I have several excellent excuses for why that didn’t happen, but I’ve run out of alibis. March has rolled around again, as it seems to do around this time of year, so it’s time to tell the rest of this story. First of all, you may be interested to know that I have recently embarked upon yet another career. You’ll remember that this all sta

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

Here’s a little something to think about before we get started: If you were hiring a musical act and could only judge the applicants based on their resumes, what’s the single most impressive thing you could find on one of those resumes? What’s the one thing that, if you read it, would immediately make you say “OK. You win. The job’s yours”? What if they said they had won a Grammy? Big deal. Lots of people have one of those. Gold records? Platinum records? That’s nic

This is a story about Oregon’s oldest recorded murder case. It wasn’t the first murder; there had been a few others. But for technical reasons that I won’t bore you with, this was Oregon’s first recorded murder and it happened just down the road in Benton County in 1852. Before Billy the Kid or Butch Cassidy were even born, when Jesse James was still a little boy, before Wild Bill Hickock’s gunfighting career had even started and more than a quarter century before the Earp