My Made Up Life

Memoirs and other tall tales.

  • Beat
    Yeah, well, maybe, I guess. One of those headlines that today we call clickbait. Do we want to read about what happened? An uprising of the counterculture? The fringe fraying from the body politic of the established order? Perhaps. We’ve been thinking and writing about the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies, with a preamble Read More
  • Something To Give Thanks For
    Well, there are so many things we can give thanks for when we really think about it. For all its faults, life is pretty fine and, as is so often said, it’s better than the alternative – although none of us living can be certain that’s true. BUT, I am especially thankful to be realizing Read More
  • Space To Contemplate
    My grandmother, Tina, was a young woman when she travelled with her family to California to visit relatives. It was her first trip to the West Coast. The second day there everybody hopped aboard the car to take in the ocean. When they arrived at the beach, Tina walked down the sand to the edge Read More
  • Poster Boy
    A few people over the years have asked me how I became a columnist at The Denver Post at such a young age. It’s one of those right place, right time tales, but with enough curiosities to make it (hopefully) interesting.   Early 1968. You’re just back from the East Coast, with a detour to San Read More
  • Artistry
    Art and artistry. Thank the gods and goddesses for blessing us so. Can’t imagine life without it. So many problems in this world of ours. Nothing but bad news. Gloom and doom. A global pandemic. Government everywhere in crisis. One American political party in the grip of a madman. The other in a maelstrom of Read More
  • It’s a Mystery
      One day when I was a young man working at The Denver Post, a reporter I admired dropped by my desk to give me some surprising news. His name was John Dunning, he was a few years older than I, and struck me as equal parts 1930s movie character and Jack Kerouac protagonist. John Read More
  • In Montana Manners Matter
    In fishing manners matter. It’s true today as it was 40 years ago when this story took place. One thing you never do is cross another fisherman’s line. You also don’t slip in upriver from where a fisherman’s working. Fly-fishers work on upriver after trout and stay out of each other’s way to the greatest degree Read More
  • Uncle Billy in the Last Best Place
    Uncle Billy came calling on more than one occasion and it was always a pleasure when he did. He and you had been tighter than ticks in the bad old days in Boulder and Denver, spent a lot of time, effort, and money together dancing on the hyphen of irrationality, as he might put it. Read More
  • What It Was!
    You begin in a little room in a little house in a little neighborhood. You get to know your neighbors a few at a time. They are Sparr, Mruz, Vannis, Hawkins. Up the street, the Allisons. Over on Krameria, there’s even a kid from New York named Jerry Cohen. He knows about the Brooklyn Dodgers Read More
  • Harbinger: Signs of Change
    Harbinger. I first heard the word when I was eight or nine. I asked my mother what it meant. “A sign,” she said. “Like the first robin of spring.” In my boyhood home of Colorado, where the winters could be long, the coming of warm weather, the melting of all that snow, was a sign Read More