My family and I returned to the wall because I needed to see it again. This time we had a name to look up, Wayne Anderson. He was a distant relation, not ever met by me, but at the hotel I had overheard his mother talking to my aunt. “We found Wayne’s name on the wall” she said, just like that, as if we would all know what the wall was. And we did. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall is in Washington DC in a side area of the vast green mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. [...]

  When Melody and I decided to move to Benicia twenty-two years ago it was about getting a water view, but we were of limited means, so I knew our best strategy was to buy the worst house with the best view we could find. Of the two of us, I was the only one with passion for this particular strategy, but she sensed my enthusiasm for throwing myself into a “fixer upper” and trusted me. It was years later that I learned that her challenge during our house-hunting had been to relax and [...]

I recently helped deliver my daughter to her new life at UCLA. While there I made a point to visit “Bruin Walk” to flashback to the best two months of my life when I learned that I could take on the world and win. That’s what if felt like. In 1983 I was an architecture student and I ended up saving one of the best parts of that beautiful campus from some really klutzy landscape design right before the university was all set to build it. They even had a builder all lined up when I happened to see an [...]