Charles Frenzel

Staccato bark of trembling metal hounds crouching at the line.

I’m writing this as I sit in front of the Copy Center in the shopping center across the road from Jackson Creek. Fortunately these shops are all high above the street level. I’m thinking about that nice art gallery that the folks from Mexico just put in. Their place is down on the level of […]

Happy New Year! Larry and Georgia have sent us two muffaletto buns and a jar of olive salad from New Orleans. We’re going to have mufs and wine with Sandy and Tony for lunch. Then Tony calls to tell us that Sandy has broken her foot (again), so we’re going to Burger King for lunch […]

On the twenty ninth I write in my journal that “the big storm that was supposed to move into California so far has been nothing more than a shift in the wind and a few splatters of cold drops. The weather folks are starting to talk about combined effects and next wave. I’m thinking bad […]

A few weeks later, after receiving her nomination for the next Rotary District Governor of the California-Nevada District, she is talking with her father back in Texas. It’s easy to hear both sides of the conversation. He shouts into the telephone as if he were still using one of those old horn shaped wooden boxes. […]

My wife, Lydia, and I have moved out of our house and placed all of the stuff we didn’t haul off to the county dump into a ten by fifteen-foot storage shed. There are also trunks, dishes, and an antique chest stuffed into a friend’s garage. It took us ten years to fill our modest […]

August I feel the dog’s big paws shake the bed, and I pry open my eyes. I am lying on my right side facing the window. Dawn’s light filters through the narrow blinds like an unwelcome searchlight, and all I can make out is the black shadow of Burt’s head peering at me over the […]

It strikes me that this is the moment in time in which their dream, not yours, is fulfilled. We are there for them. It is their time to remember and to know. We do not yet know, and so cannot remember. Next year, I tell myself. Next year I will understand. I hear one of […]

Here I am with Lydia in a snack bar in the Seattle airport. As usual, the plane is forty minutes late. I’m having a snack of mild, Cajun sausage—now there’s an oxymoron—and some soupy, potato stuff that is too salty. She’s having something described as Stroganoff. I use a damp paper napkin to scrub a […]

That evening, we sit about a table up on the fifteenth floor (again) for a dinner with just the governors and their partners. The topic of conversation turns to some protests by a group of women in Canada. According to Ron (or was it Elaine?) these women actually burned down their houses in protest, then […]

I get up at 6:30 A.M. the next morning because Lydia is going to an early meeting with her fellow Rotarian governor nominees and I am attending a special “Tea”. I rise to the fifteenth floor of the West tower and enter a world of white, frilled aprons, perfume, and the chatter of female voices. […]

I put down on paper the preceding thoughts either late Wednesday night or very early on Thursday morning, in Anchorage. Thursday, October 3, and where has the time gone? I have a luncheon with the Governor’s spouses. I sit at table five, between LaVonne and Elleen. There’s not going to be much room on the […]

Neither the drinks nor the food is very easy to get, the place is so crowded. The stage show is rather funny, though some of the jokes are too explicit for the genteel half of our company. Fortunately, they are in the minority. The rest of us get rather raucous and rather drunk during the […]

The women and I are seated in a circle around the edge of the room, so each of us in turn takes about thirty seconds to introduce ourselves. Valerie, the stunning redhead that I sat next to last night, says she is a little nervous about speaking, so she will follow some advice and imagine […]

The morning of October 2, I follow suggestions from the tourist information center behind the hotel and stroll over to the 4th Street Theater. There, I walk around on the restored stage which has some of the sets of the previous play still leaning about on some boxes. It looks like an interior design for […]