Famous people die in threes, as in Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett Majors and Michael Jackson. Important people, not necessarily famous, pass away in pairs.

Two people who have been close to my family, though probably unacquainted with each other, are Robert W. Johnston and Nea Escudero.

First Bob.

The name Johnston in Las Vegas is much less common than Johnson, without the “t.” Robert K. Johnston, a prolific writer of letters to the editor, for a time was confused with the Robert with a W in his name. I know both.

Robert W. had a background in journalism and advertising, even having worked briefly for the Optic. He lived two doors from my house at Camp Luna. He’d come to my house with his Welsh corgi “Tigger” and invite me on walks. I’d take along my whippets, “Moosa” and “Watsita.” Soon, Bob would come to the house and announce, “Tigger asked me about Moosa and Watsita and wondered  if they could come out and play.”

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“Pareces una polilla!” Mom would shout as her underweight, overdressed 50-pound son began his daily uphill trek to his fourth-grade classes at Immaculate Conception School.

And why the unflattering epithet? Well, perhaps I did somewhat resemble a moth. Year-round, Mom had a sartorial regimen which mandated a thick T-shirt surrounded by a long-sleeve corduroy shirt covered by a thick Red Ryder sweatshirt, all enclosed by a cotton jacket.

Sixty years ago, Mom could have been the inspiration for today’s seven-layer burrito. The polilla (pronounced po-LEE-ah) reference came in part from my own rebellion. Three layers of clothing were uncomfortable, even on crisp mornings during the five-mile jaunt, but the top layer, the jacket, was just too much. So I’d remove it, knot the sleeves together around my neck, cape-like. That’s what created the moth appearance.

I never gave much thought to moths until my courting days during my 20s. Once, I joined the family for potato soup at the Coppock farm near Springer. The family had its own cows and began preparations by filling a large cauldron with milk, heating it and crumbling into it a small bag of potato chips, the kind and size we find in kindergartners’ school lunch bags. Continue reading →

The weekend was a great opportunity to live like an estimated 2.7 million people who went without.

Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population watched blank TV screens, or nothing at all when the media industry converted from analog to digital. The rationale is simple: If you don’t already have cable or satellite and if you failed to acquire a converter box, your TV set went blank.

I joined the TV furlough for one day, but the sacrifice was far different from simply being out of town and away from the idiot box. In my case, the penance was self-imposed and deliberate.

Let me explain: Continue reading →

School’s out and there’s evidence of kids enjoying the outdoors. I hope the trend lasts and youngsters continue to soak up some rays instead of overdosing on video games.

At the moment a dozen kids are enjoying a game of baseball in the field just north of our house. I don’t know all of them, only my three grandchildren and their neighbor Soley. It’s a loosely organized game of baseball in which every time the bat makes contact, it’s a homerun.

The most crucial part is deciding which team bats first. If your team does, you win, something like 25 to 0. Why? The other team would have won if its players had batted first.

These games are generally called in the first half of the first inning — because darkness arrives before the other team gets to bat. Maybe if they can remember tonight’s score and continue tomorrow, the other team will have a chance. But judging by the happy smile my grandson and namesake is wearing on his face, I suspect his team won. Continue reading →

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK – Two weeks in Scandinavia, for a vacation and the baptism of grand-daughter Ellen Vestergaard Trujillo, mark our third trip here. We just returned from a side trip to Stockholm, Sweden, the farthest east we’ve ever been, and though we have a better feel of the turf both in Stockholm and Copenhagen, we have much to learn.

Let me explain:

When our son Stan moved here three years ago and said he took the subway and train each day to work, we envied him: What a stress-free way to read the morning paper. The other option was by bike. He could join literally a million other bicyclists who pedal to work. Continue reading →

 

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK – What exactly is an expiration date? Much after the fact, I pondered that question following a hassling by a usually-friendly staff of customs-passport inspectors at the airport in Copenhagen, Denmark.

This is our third trip here. Our passports, acquired in June 1999, show proof of our visits to this area twice before, in 2006, 2008 and this year. The policy is for each visitor landing at Kastrup International to furnish proof of residency.

The economy has made some trans-oceanic travel skimpy, and after landing from a half-empty flight, we figured we’d breeze through the passport check. We were last in the line of about 100. My wife Bonnie stopped at a kiosk manned by a gentleman who welcomed her to the land of Hans Christian Andersen. He checked her photo ID and passport, stamped the booklet and sent her on her way. Continue reading →

In Edward Albee’s play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” George, the host at a late-night party, tells the guests about how faculty wives “gather at the downtown A&P like a bunch of geese.”

The guest “corrects” George by saying the proper term is “a gangle of geese, not a bunch.” Well, the host, played by Richard Burton, points out that if the guest is “going to be cute and ornithological about it,” the correct term is “gaggle, not gangle.”

Which makes us ask, what do geese do when they congregate to qualify as a gaggle? In flight, geese generally constitute a flock or a skein, but on the ground, they’re a gaggle.

Nouns of assemblage, usually descriptive of fowls, give virtually no clue as to why it’s all right to refer to a herd of cows but not of lions. Lions hang out in a pride, and fish are in schools.

There’s a suspense movie, “A Murder of Crows,” starring Cuba Gooding Jr., the title of which refers, of course, to crows but doesn’t explain what’s murderous about them. Could enough vultures, as opposed to crows, constitute a murder? Not likely, as vultures’ meals of choice have already been murdered and are now road kill.

Let’s examine some of the groups: Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, driving in Albuquerque, we noticed a couple — one steering, both pushing — who’d run out of gas close to a service station.

With my wife driving, I did the Good Samaritan regimen, hopped out of the passenger’s side to help them get their Chevette up the ramp to the gas pumps on Montgomery.

Now most people would be thankful for anyone, even a 69-year-old at the time, who agrees to add a few pounds to the pushing, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, I was treated to some choice language (redacted here, in this family newspaper) that only irate out-of-gas Chevette owners can express.

They didn’t direct the invective at me; rather, they hollered around me. “I told you to fill up the f—— car before we left the house. But no-oo, you had to be Mr. Tight A–.”

“Why don’t you shut your pie-hole, you f——- b—-?” Continue reading →

Sometimes even the experts simply have it wrong. I’m staring at a dozen grammar and style books trying to locate some of the most common errors people commit in writing and speech.

We concede that because people speak about 10 times faster than they write, the ear tunes out some — but not all — of the errors we hear. Because we have more time to read things, we can be more critical of errors in print.

Let me explain:

Now that I’ve turned 70, my short-term memory is not what it used to be. In fact, my short-term memory is not what it used to be. We often hear locutions like, “They gave the award to she and I.”

She and I? Hardly. They gave the award to her and me. Because such a sentence is fairly common, I checked some sources, trying to find an explanation. The first source, a yellowed, ‘60s-era newspaper stylebook, explained that people often use the wrong pronoun in feigning snobbishness. According to the editors of the stylebook, “she and I” sounds more high-falutin’ than “her and me,” and that’s why it’s used that way. Continue reading →

Perhaps no mark of punctuation — this one among the smallest in the English language — has caused more grief. It’s misuse appears to be what its best noted for.

Let me explain:

The apostrophe (‘), that little cosa that few people are able to master, more than anything else, has caused English teachers to turn in their chalk prematurely and declare, “never again.”

The last time I taught freshman composition at Luna Community College, I may have frightened a coed when I wrote “never again!” on her introductory essay. I’d meant that admonition to refer solely to her habit of writing “it’s” when she meant “its.”

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