Author: joenovara

A familiar sight, my grandchild absorbed in his ‘screens.’ Focused on a small rectangle of light and magic, absorbed in animated conflicts, he is cocooned within the world around him. Like a writer subsumed by his concentration, he startles and remonstrates if someone barges into the room with real-life presence and demands. As I age, … Continue reading Screens and memories

joke telling...an art to be shared across the generations I do jokes. Not professionally, since, technically, I don’t get paid. I just perform at family gatherings where sometimes I have to chum the audience with a few one-liners to get the hilarity level up and bubbling. I only fathered daughters who can seem, at times, … Continue reading Getting the Set-up Right

A group of folks in our town work hard to produce old fashioned radio shows. They solicit and select thirty-minute scripts for a live production in a local church before a live audience for ultimate playback on NPR. As you might imagine there are a lot of moving parts from cast auditions, to tech crew … Continue reading Throwback Medium

Did you ever notice that chipmunks all look the same? I suppose if you hung out with them for a long time you would begin to notice differences between them. Think Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees. She got to know each of them so well, she even gave them endearing names. The chipmunks in my yard … Continue reading Animal Bigot

all stories are true and some of them actually happened I used to work for a major pharmaceutical company—in purchasing actually. But over years of coffee breaks and lunches I developed a rep for joke telling—longer anecdotes at the table; quick one-liners in the hallways and elevators. And eventually I had managers and department heads … Continue reading Humor Consultant

The respirator pulsed with the trip-hammer rhythm of a base drummer pounding thoughts out of my head. Just as well. What is there to think about at this stage? Or to talk about, as if I could, masked as I am. My wife squeezes my hand. Sandra doesn’t need words from me, as we sit … Continue reading Beyond Words

‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ blaring from the Good Humor truck trolling our neighborhood got me salivating for a popsicle. Another sound that got me running as a youngster was the single note, BLAT, of the junk man’s horn and his dreary old horse dragging a spoke-wheeled wagon through our alley. Recycling made easy. We didn’t … Continue reading Archeologists and Alley Pickers

I was waiting in the left turn lane of a four-lane road for a break in the long line of facing traffic. Destination: a gas station that charged two cents less per gallon than the station two lanes over on my right. My granddaughter looked up from her book and asked, “Why are you turning … Continue reading Old Dog…Old Tricks

I felt the need to make something, not sure what, but out of wood. I was tired of words, words, words, teaching English 101 and all the grammar, topic sentences, definitions and spelling. If I was a beaver, I would say, I needed something to sink my teeth into. So, I went to the lumber … Continue reading Wood’n Words