Forty-four years after I graduated from high school, I heard that one of my favorite teachers was not doing well. I was able to find an email address for his daughter. This is an edited and digested form of the letter I sent to her, for her to read to…

By Daniel McCoy “Jim! Danny! You better get up! You don’t want to be late for school!” My mom is holding the bedroom door half open and calling from the hallway. She had called us a few minutes earlier, but both my brother Jim and I had drifted back off to…

I do love a good Mark Twain quote. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” One thing I really love about that quote is how it kind of spirals in on itself if you try to…

With all of the talk of race, I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience growing up in San Jose, California, back when San Jose was known for orchards instead of silicon and software. Most of San Jose, and certainly the part I grew up in, was pretty white. The…

I recently saw an ad for some slogan t-shirts and one particular slogan caught my eye. It was a quote attributed to George Washington that I wasn’t familiar with:

There have been many essays about problems with the old left vs. right political paradigm. I’d like to attempt a view from a higher altitude than usual and hope it might lead to some useful insights. In recent years I’ve begun to see many problems in terms of humankind’s tendency…

On July 23rd, 1926, a baby girl was born in the little town of Los Banos, California to Francis and Tillie McDonald. The addition of little Eleanor Lois made the McDonald family come out even, three boys and three girls: Roy, Lula, Buck, Jim, Molly Jean, and now, baby Eleanor…

It’s not every day that I connect Buddhism and L. Frank Baum, so I thought I would write this one down. The connection began recently when a friend posted this quote on Facebook: “What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life…

We understand the world through stories. Many stories are buried so deeply in our way of seeing the world that they are not obvious to us and it takes some mental work to expose them and see that they are stories rather than objective reality. …