Maybe my greying mustache and my already-greyed hair make me look more presentable to personnel with the Transportation Safety Administration at major U.S. and foreign airports. I say “maybe” because it seems I was hassled less than ever before on this go-round to Iceland.

There are a few perks to passing the age-75 barrier: People my age and older don’t need to remove their shoes when passing through that scanners that check for strange objects. I don’t consider that such an honor, but merely a way to show up my wife, Bonnie, who has one more shoe-removing routine to undergo, before she reaches the Big Five-Oh.

Except for Icelandic Airlines’ mistakenly shipping my bag to Seattle and not returning it until we arrived home, the trip went well. One gets used to washing out clothes each night.

After my retirement from teaching, in 1999, I’ve captured myriad incidents that I hadn’t expected. This column is not intended to serve as a travelogue, but merely as a way to highlight some of the silly and not-so-silly incidents visited on a person (me), who for quite a while asked myself, “Self, do I look like a terrorist?”

In no particular order, here are a few encounters with airport officials that have made me wonder whether I’d ever make it home again: Continue reading →

Almost daily we read or hear about someone who’s upset over not being allowed to use a restroom of his/her choice. When I taught at Highlands, the word “gender” referred to grammatical terms such as he or she. It wasn’t used to describe sex, as in male or female. But in the past few years, an issue — which I won’t dare try to officiate — regarding which restroom one should occupy, has become big news.

In the 1990s, most of my classes at Highlands University were on the second level of Mortimer Hall, the classroom building that used to rest where the new student union lives. It began as a dorm, possibly as early as the 1950s.

Even though it was a men’s dormitory, the upstairs restroom had all the necessary equipment for men, but at ground level, the layout clearly favored women. Why would women be in a men’s dorm? Maybe there were people of the opposite sex (er—gender) who worked there.

I never gave the restroom arrangement much thought until one of my students in an evening class, who was scheduled to give a presentation, asked me to guard the door to the men’s room while she made a pit stop. Obviously in discomfort, she said she wouldn’t be able to make the trip downstairs. Continue reading →

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND — One of the more memorable lines in a locally-produced play called “The Odd Couple” was about a minor character, a card player named Vinnie, who decided to vacation in Florida in the summer. I played the role of Vinnie, and during rehearsals often wondered who in all creation would even think of such a trip at such a place.

We did. Well, kind of.

That was when my wife and I opted for an eight-day trip to Iceland this month, February. And why would anyone travel there in this cold month? One day, when it hovered around freezing, here in Iceland, we found that even in mid-winter, temperatures one day were comparable to those in our own Las Vegas.

Please don’t misunderstand: The place where we landed, Reykjavik, Iceland, isn’t exactly Tampa or Miami; it does have periods of cold, mostly a constant drizzle. But regardless of the temperatures, we’ve yet to see the sun, except for a moment just before we landed, when the sun peeked through a cloud, thought about it for a moment, and went back into hiding.

It’s been both a challenge and an eye-opener to visit Iceland, an island the size of Ohio. The day we arrived, a fellow Icelandic Air passenger told us a version of how Iceland and Greenland got their names. Continue reading →

Most of the boxes are packed, the furniture has been moved to our new offices, and the movers have finally gotten my hundred-pound dictionary out the door.

About all that remains is junking the unwanted equipment and finding the best place for my Pulitzer Prize. OK, so I don’t really have a hundred pound dictionary, much less a Pulitzer, sadly. The closest thing I have to that coveted award is what results when I try to make breakfast and come up with a Pullet Surprise.

As we turn the page on this chapter of the Optic’s history, I can’t help but think back to the many years I have spent at this decrepit old building, serving as everything from a paperboy to a columnist. I insult the building but I will grudgingly admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for the old place, which has housed the Optic since the dawn of time — OK so it just feels that way.

I can say definitively that we’ve been at our current location on Lincoln Avenue for more than 100 years. I respect the history that has played out here.

It’s difficult to identify too many local businesses that pre-date the Las Vegas Optic.

Founded in 1879 by Russell A. Kistler, the Optic turns 138 this year. And with its aging have come many changes. Continue reading →

Pick up any news article that deals with the bestowing of some sort of honor, be it the Super Bowl championship, winning the presidency of the United States, being named a beauty queen or being appointed hallway monitor at your high school. It doesn’t matter.

What these supposed honors have in common is the choice of words the awardees use. Invariably, you’ll run across “humbled,” as in “I’m humbled to have been elected president.”

Let’s parse the word. Let’s examine its usage and examine why people have virtually reversed the meaning of the word. Let’s say somebody wins a mayoral election and says, “I’m extremely humbled to have been chosen as your mayor.” That sentence will doubtless be followed by the grandiose plans Señor or Señora Mayor wishes to put in place.

Most post-election speeches contain a smattering of plans, but before getting to the vast improvements, the audience generally needs to hear how “humbled” the winner has become. Most dictionaries define “humbled” as “marked by meekness or modesty, not arrogant or prideful.” Another alternative meaning given is “submissive respect,” as in a humble apology. Yet another alternate meaning says someone “humble” is “low in rank, quality, or station, unpretentious or lowly.” Continue reading →

Yippee! We’re in the money, as the old song goes. Just minutes ago I received an email. It’s informal, starts only with “Hi” and its brief message is: “A Payment may have been sent to you.” The amount: $4,392.81. The status is marked as “Approved.”

The final sentence says, “If this email was sent to you by mistake, please ignore it.” And it ends with “Good luck.” The typed name is simply Richard L. I thank Richard for the familiarity and applaud the casual tone of somehow sending by mistake an email that promises a financial reward.

Ah, shucks! Easy come — easy go. And thanks for getting my hopes up. Thanks for symbolically ripping that check out of my cold, shaking, 77-year-old hands.

I’d grown almost to miss such missives. We have a brief history of “pie in the sky.” When my mother, Marie, was alive, she called me excitedly with the “news” that she was about to receive a check for $1,000.

Please note that a check of almost any amount, received serendipitously, would be welcome. People lived much more frugally in those days. Mom and Dad bought the house they lived and died in for $2,000. And the seller, a close relative, let them pay it off in $10 chunks, whenever they could. Continue reading →

A school child was greeted with a question as he came home. His mother asked, “Who’s president of the United States?” The boy answered, “Barrack Obama.”

“Wrrrronnng!” his mother replied. “It’s Donald Trump.” Apparently the mom expected her boy’s answer not only to be correct, but also timely.

And when Dad got home and was apprised of the boy’s having missed the answer, he said, as ALL fathers seem to say, “Well, when I was your age, I knew the names of all the presidents of the U.S., in order of their elections.”

And what did the kid reply? “Well, when you were my age, there weren’t as many presidents as there are now.” Notice that it’s hard not to appear like a smarty-pants whenever we begin any sentence with “Well, when I was your age.”

Yes, learning becomes a cumulative task. Some teachers may STILL require rote memorization of the order of presidents. When people my age were in school, merely having heard of a Roosevelt was about all that was expected of us for that presidential roll call. Continue reading →

A resident of the tiny town of Ocate, N.M., just a few miles from Wagon Mound, proved that she can go bankrupt two or three times in just a few minutes but still have a tidy sum to get her back home.

We’re referring to Terri Mares, who with her daughter Tracy Alcon, made the trip to Culver City, outside of Los Angeles, in December, for the taping of the popular CBS program, “Wheel of Fortune.” The game involves trying to figure out words and familiar phrases on the basis of letters that appear on the board. Contestants are allowed to “buy” vowels to help compose words and phrases.

Getting on the program that stars host Pat Sajak and the letter-turning Vanna White was an arduous process that started with taking tests and undergoing interviews at the Buffalo Thunder Hotel near Albuquerque earlier.

Terri, a former business manager for Wagon Mound Schools and later the comptroller for Luna Community College, said she’s always been a bit competitive and thought of appearing on Wheel of Fortune as a great challenge and honor. “There must have been up to 150 people interested in taking the tests to get on the program,” Terri said. Continue reading →

What do you suppose Ed, Art and Art Jr. did Monday night? One safe bet is that they gathered around a TV set to watch the national college championship football game between the Clemson Tigers and the Alabama Crimson Tide.

And why any particular interest in this game? They watched because they enjoy high-quality football but MAINLY because Ed, who is the son of Edward Leland Abreu, was a starting player for the South Carolina team some 40 years ago, in the Gator Bowl.

But as proud as area folk are of Ed Abreu’s athletic skills, the actions of an elderly coach for Clemson’s opponents, Ohio State, we need to accept that the actions of Ohio coach Woody Hayes drew many of the headlines week in 1978.

The name Woody Hayes became a household word because of a punch that might have hurt the puncher more than the punchee.

Close to the end of that year’s Gator Bowl, the legendary Ohio State football coach delivered the punch — more like a love tap than a real blow. Hayes’ pain assuredly came more from the punch that ended his illustrious football-coaching career with the Buckeyes.

Grid fanatics have told and retold the story millions of times. One of the players who was up close to the action was Ed Abreu, part of a crew of super athletes with that surname. Ed’s father is Leland Edward Abreu, the younger brother of the late Ernesto Abreu. Continue reading →

How many times have you had somebody, upon hearing you’re from New Mexico, ask 1) how far you live from Mexico City, 2) what unit of currency is in use in that place way south of the U.S., or 3) are you ever afraid the Immigration and Naturalization Department will be shipping you back home?

We denizens of the Meadow City often face another barrier to communication as we explain that we are not the glitzy gambling city in Nevada. Geographic confusion makes me wonder about the quality (or even the existence) of geography instruction in American schools. Why is it that of our dozen trips to Europe, all our acquaintances there seem able to locate New Mexico?

But yet, many fellow Americans had trouble recognizing this state. My three-year stint in Illinois when I was in my early 20s, included a recitation of explanations combined with mini-geography lessons. The I’m-not-from-Mexico-City routine is the essence of a column in New Mexico Magazine: “One of Our 50 is Missing.”

Usually the submitted items are about someone’s confusion as to whether to carry pesos rather than real dollars or whether we perform El Jarabe Tapatio (Mexican Hat Dance) upon rising each morning. Retired language professor, Sara Harris, provided the tapatio translation. If not for my former Highlands colleague, I might have interpreted “Jarabe Tapatio” as a blend of jam and tapioca. Continue reading →