Apologetically, Adrian asked Lisa and me to drive him home early from the wake. It was all too much – the photos of his dead wife circulating, her family and friends chatting…

You know how you create a picture of yourself over the years, a kind of tableau of your past, in your own mind if in no-one else’s? I do that a lot,…

Before the virus showed its stuff, we did make it to the Elvis Costello concert in Sunderland, northeast England, on March 3. Third row tickets explained the choice of venue, and the…

“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” Remember that? “When Harry met…

During a marital dispute on April 12, 2019, M. Sean Gilligan lost his temper with his wife Lisa Valenzuela and wrenched her wrists. Instead of taking her to the emergency room, as…

Covid-19 became real for Lisa and me on the morning of March 12, as we arrived at Roissy, Paris’s main airport, to check in for our Air France flight to San Francisco.…

Isn’t that a great word? Seenager, a cross between a senior and a teenager. That has been me this year. I only realized it when I first heard the word, in November,…

I was in front of my bathroom mirror in the Scotts Valley condo, as I was first thing most mornings. The view in 2011 was pretty much what I was getting used…

When Marie-Helene and I first got together, I rescued her from a deadbeat dad: not hers, her then partner. His name is Pierre, and he is Daphne and Alban’s father. Marie-Helene’s clever…

I trusted my divorce lawyer, Vicki Parry, to assure the well-being of my children and my own (and their) financial future. A lawyer myself, why did I delegate to another lawyer delicate…

The most miserable year of my life was the year I spent as a boarder at Solihull School, 1966. I wrote about it in too much detail elsewhere: how dreadfully I missed my…

In December of 2017 I turned 65. This means, officially, that I am getting old. I am not. I may have reached the age of the “old age pensioner” of my youth,…

This post is a warning to Paris’s abundant startup techies: you can’t always trust your employers! Disclosure: the techie here is my son Nick. Keep reading for a variety of tricks used…

So the first thing that you should know is that sometimes others assert that I have poor filters and am a little too honest. This is one context when that quality might…

I lived with and under that tarpaulin for maybe seven months. Obviously, I did not want to move into the RV in the first place. I’m an RV fan, but for travel…

I was sitting at the bar in Oswald’s, one of Santa Cruz’s nicer restaurants, chatting and flirting. This was during the year’s gap between girlfriends, sometime during the summer. First a woman…

I did reach the top of Mount Tallac, the craggy mountain that dominates the Southwest shore of Lake Tahoe. But only just. The last few hundred vertical feet had been very hard,…

Nick came home for his 30th birthday. At least, I feel like it’s his home here in California, although his mother makes her home in Paris, and he spent half his childhood…

It’s Christmas Day, an incredibly beautiful day here in Santa Cruz after the wind and rain of the last few days. As we drove home, the air was clearer and brighter than…

The AirBnB listing for the apartment said that it was a fourth floor walk-up, but the comments on AirBnB warned us that it was more like five floors. It was five, and it…

Another year done, as Charlie delicately reminded me recently. I was trying to help him recognize a girl he knew whom I had met, and told him that her hair color was…

Happy Holidays, everyone!! It’s been a solitary year here. I don’t say lonely, because with the possible exception of holidays built around families, I’m having a fine time – so many little…

Santa Cruz Mayor Ryan Coonerty is a chocoholic, as am I. We both work at NextSpace Santa Cruz, Ryan for PredPol, an interesting start-up that uses technology to help police forces do…

On Monday morning, August 1, 2011, Nick (my oldest) arrived at work to be told that he was being laid off immediately and would not be paid the last month’s salary of…