Month: November 2025

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Road Blog: Away Down the Valley.

7th Standard Road, Kern County.

Above: A sighting just after getting off Interstate 5 to cut over to Highway 99 on our way to the desert and (eventually) the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The irony of the sign — one of dozens or maybe even hundreds by this time scattered across the southern two-thirds of the Central Valley — was too good to pass up. The area has had about 2 inches of rain in the past week, benefiting from the big storm that swept through the rest of Southern California.

We’re in Barstow tonight after about seven hours on the road today. Thinking we’ll be in Flagstaff tomorrow night.

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Jimmy Kimmel and a Lesson in Sharing Grief

A friend shared the video below of Jimmy Kimmel paying tribute to Cleto Escobedo, a lifelong friend and the bandleader on his show who died earlier this week. “I feel like you’ll appreciate this,” my friend said. “It’s apropos of nothing relevant, but I found it pretty moving.”

It is moving, for sure. Kimmel takes 22 minutes to recount his friendship with Escobedo, which started when he was 9 years old, and how they came to work together on late-night television. The story is both funny and wrenching as Kimmel makes it clear how much he loved his friend and how heartbroken he is at losing him.

I wonder whether honest displays of sadness and grieving and genuine expressions of love like this can have a wider impact on our culture, much of which is dominated by phony, ginned-up histrionics designed to provoke outrage and stir our sense of grievance. Which isn’t to say there isn’t plenty to be outraged by in this world of ours. But we might live in a healthier, more humane world if we learn to talk honestly with each other about all our joys and sorrows, not just the stuff that enrages us.

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The Retirement Chronicles

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of “retirement,” sense 4.a, which is said to have been in common use since the mid-18th century:

“The state or condition of having left office, employment, or service permanently, now esp. on reaching pensionable age; the period of a person’s life after retiring from office or employment. Also: the state of having withdrawn permanently from one’s usual sphere of activity. Frequently in in (one’s) retirement.”

I’m looking that up because — here’s my buried lede — I’ve worked my last day as a staff reporter and editor at KQED in San Francisco, and, having reached my early 70s, the popular notion of what lies ahead is retirement. I don’t think the OED definition quite fits me, though. I refer to the “condition of having left employment … permanently.” As I’ve been telling people, I don’t feel like I’m done with journalism, where I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life. I feel like I’ll always have stories to tell and will find ways of telling at least a few of them. But maybe that’s insecurity speaking, prompted by all the uncertainty I feel about what really comes next.

I’ll leave The Retirement Chronicles there for now. More to come.