During a pre-teen growth spurt, I told my mother that my blanket no longer covered my toes. She asked, “What about your shoulders and neck?” “No problem there, Mom.”
    So she set out to correct the problem by saying she’d cut a foot off the top of the blanket and sew it to the bottom.
    Departing from my up-at-the-crack-of-noon regimen, I made it to work one day last week before 8. Since the time I chose was unusual, I was surprised to see dozens and dozens of cars converging where the main road to Luna (Maximiliano) meets Hot Springs, and (sort of) meets a road that became quite popular once it got paved.
    There’s a man in Hindustan, or maybe it was Iowa, who claims to have participated in a Monopoly game that ended. If he’s telling the truth, he’s part of a rare crowd.
    We weren’t bad kids in my youth, but we were inescapably identified by the adages that most people in middle-20th-century Las Vegas led their lives by: birds of a feather and guilt by association.
    There are only two kinds of people: those who wear purses and those who don’t. The former are called women.
    Because of vanity and machismo, men don’t carry purses. The rare men who need to tote their earthly belongings use briefcases, backpacks and attache cases.
    Clearly upset that the Adams State Grizzlies had scored another touchdown and were starting to rub it in, Art Abreu, a tight-ends coach and play-by-play sportscaster for the Highlands Cowboys, asked on the air why such demonstrations are tolerated.
    Partly by accident, partly by design, a few days ago, I went penniless with my wife on a flight to Seattle for a six-day visit with our son Stan. I vowed to handle all my business on plastic. I didn’t even take a checkbook, given that fewer and fewer places even accept checks anymore. One person bounces a $10 check at a local restaurant and everybody else suffers.
    By far the liveliest discussion ever to take place in any class I taught at Highlands had to do with our conception of proper punishment for sex offenders.
    “They don’t make cars like they used to.” And to that, let us all say “amen.”
    Except for times when we lived in apartments, dogs and cats have always been a big part of our lives. Not just our pets, but everybody else’s, it seems.