Victory sometimes takes years to achieve. It took a long time to persuade some members of my congregation that the annual meeting doesn’t necessarily have to conflict with the Super Bowl. It did one year, when my Oakland Raiders beat Philadelphia. And that was during the times when video recorders sold for $600 and Tivo was several dreams away. Not only did our meeting take place on the same day as the big game, it was scheduled for the same hours as well.

“Don’t you see, Art, that we’re doing the work of the Lord? And besides, the Lord doesn’t care about a football game,” one member said. I concluded the Lord most certainly would be at the game, and our annual meeting in the future could and should be moved up or back a week.

My remark was that I’d phoned Paul Tagliabue, then-commissioner of football, to ask whether the date of the Super Bowl could be changed to accommodate my church’s schedule. I told members of my church, “Paul Tagliabue seems a lot more flexible than some of you.”

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One of the more telling lines about language was uttered by Jack Lemmon in the 1965 movie, “How to Murder Your Wife.”

A confirmed bachelor, Stanley Ford, played by Lemmon, gets drunk at a bachelor party, proposes to the beautiful Virna Lisi, who’s just jumped out of a cake, and gets hooked, compliments of an equally inebriated judge.

The next morning, Ford awakens to find Lisi next to him in bed and discovers she speaks no English, only Italian.

He asks something like, “What’s your name?” but realizes there’s no way she’d understand, so he changes it to “What’s-a your-a name-a.”

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Always a decent speller, I’ve consistently struggled to explain to others why it’s important. Often, when I try to point out the egregious use of a word or phrase, the pontificatee comes back with “So what’s the big deal?”

In college, I was impressed when the art history professor, the late Elmer Schooley, said, “I eat nails when I see careless misspelling.” Continue reading →

Almost every morning since Christmas, I’ve awakened to find a different item covering the receiver that goes with the TV set and allows us to receive a zillion channels, most of which deal with shopping and preaching.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me . . . a sock that covered the blue light on the receiver that tells us it’s on. On the second day, My Delight balanced a pecan turtle over the blue light.

On the third day of Christmas, my spouse (by the way, the true love, My Delight and my spouse are one and the same) stood up a greeting card. Each day featured a different barrier.

My iPod has become the permanent blocking fixture. Continue reading →

No matter how hard I try, I can’t grasp various temporal and spatial concepts.For example, I’ve never understood it when someone says he rode in his convertible “with the top down.” Fortunately, there are few convertibles anymore, so I don’t have to think. But seriously, does having the top down mean the convertible was closed? Or was it open?

Another concept I’ve wrestled with is the idea of “setting the clock back” for the time change. To me, setting the clock back means reversing the motion of the hands. Ergo, at 2 a.m., if we set the hands to read 1 a.m., we’ve “set the clock back.” I say this because “setting the clock back” is (to me) the act of backing up the time or reversing the order. Continue reading →

This end-of-the-year column provides an opportunity to catch up on correspondence, compliments, digs, suggestions and much more.Several people provided feedback on a recent column on growing up in Las Vegas in the ‘50s and being harassed by neighborhood toughs who thought of me as a rich boy.

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Around the time that film cameras were still being bought, slightly before the digital camera revolution took hold, my brother Severino and I competed regarding the number of millimeters we owned.

If my brother showed up with a camera whose zoom lens went from 75mm to 200mm, I would have to try to top that with a lens as wide as 74 and as long as 201mm. Well, cameras just don’t work that way. You can’t buy a lens of a specific size the way you would a skein of yarn or a bolt of cloth.

With the ubiquity of digital cameras, people now seem content to brag about the number of megapixels their camera has, the way people tout horsepower, interest rates, gigabytes and implants.

As long as humans have been around, there’s always been a need to make comparisons. We have to be stronger, richer, smarter, wiser. One way is to attack youth, as if it were something to be avoided rather than a necessary step to maturity.

In fact, the very concept of maturity is in itself puzzling.

Let me explain: Continue reading →

Almost two years ago, I wrote a doleful tale of the transfer of ownership of my childhood home. Unintentionally, I may have hurt the buyer’s feelings by referring to him as an outsider.

The privacy factor for us children, members of the Railroad barrio, was zilch. Almost never could one of us leave the house without meeting neighbors. We had the Maestases to our left, the Bacas to our right, and the Peñas, Kemms, Greenways, Bustoses, Gallegoses, Anayas, Herreras, Sisneros and the Vigiles a few feet away. Continue reading →

Somewhere in this area lives a slightly built, 30-ish woman who was the subject of an 82-cent misunderstanding Friday.

If she contacts me, I’ll issue an apology-explanation, whichever comes first, or, depending on how offended she was, she might get an explalogy or, as my English teacher may say, an apolognation.

Let me explaogize:

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During a train trip west, a friend and I entered the observation car to listen to a tour of Navajoland presented by a guide familiar with the area.

As unrepentant English teachers, we noticed instantly a speech mannerism of the fellow at the microphone: He ended every sentence with “so . . .” and the sentences would trail off, with nothing logically connected to the “so.”

“Why’s he doing that?” I asked Dick Panofsky, who was traveling with me to Flagstaff to visit a college communications department. We puzzled over the habit, which the speaker never failed to use, like this: “There are thousands of hogans hidden in the hills, so . . .” or “The Navajo tribe is the largest American Indian tribe, so . .

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