: About Me

The youngest of three, I was always driven to challenge my much older siblings. When I was learning to read, my high school brother had assigned reading of "The Call of the Wild." Being a rather precocious child, I said, "I can read that, I know how to read." My brother laughed. I read "The Call of the Wild," and a good deal of the dictionary in the process. It took me several months, but by the end I wasn't really interested in Dick and Jane and seeing Spot run anymore.

My Father began to challenge me each month when the Reader's Digest arrived, with "Increasing Your Word Power." I never did better than him, but a love of words was born. Spelling was another matter entirely, addressed with countless games of Scrabble. I started randomly reading the dictionary and it wasn't long before I was soundly trouncing whomever I played against.

For well over a century, my family home has been on the southern seacoast of the fictional State of Jefferson. When I was young, my Grandmother would read to me and tell stories of her life as a young girl in the late 1800's. My Father refused to have a television, the area afforded very little radio, so I grew up with an active imagination and a voracious appetite for reading.

I began to write as a freshman in high school. I joined the school paper and was appointed editor. That same year, a classmate committed suicide. Poetry was the only way I could purge the anguish from my psyche. Short stories and plays filled my high school years. But writing was a path not taken.

My adult life found me immersed in the world of numbers and finance. Any journal I may have kept throughout the years is the equivalent of a phone book comprised of matchbook covers and cocktail napkins.

Using words to paint a picture, is an endlessly entertaining pastime. Words are wonderful. They may be harsh, bold and jarring to your mind, or softly wisping through your consciousness giving rise to the wings of imagination.

Time and technology have spawned the Internet and put the world at our fingertips. The wisdom of the ages, the pulse of the present, the fantasies of the future, all available, all the time. We are no longer bound by musty stacks in a library, nor by paper and pen. This is a marvelous new toy, Internet technology, but I do despair for the language of "thumbspeak" and the archaeologists of the future.

Sports & Recreation > Boating & Sailing Which is the better sport for boaters: Sailing or motorboating?

3 of 4

Asking the question, "Which is the better sport for boaters: Sailing or motorboating?" is the first step down the slippery dock into the yachting world. Only a novice, known as a land-lubber to indoctrinated boaters, would ask such a question. That is something both motor and sail boaters would agree on, it is also likely the only thing they would agree on. In the boating community, that question sparks the equivalent of the "tastes great" / "less filling" beer arguments The debate between the "rag hangers" and the "stink pots" likely began before the ripples had calmed from the launching ...

More..

• Helium Charter Member