Author: joenovara

Ramiro is my next-door neighbor. He’s Mexican. Came to the States when he was my age. Eighteen. Now he’s eighty-one. Pretty old, but cool. He came with nothing. Now he owns his house and has a dump truck to haul dirt. That was his business. Well, not any more. He’s retired and the truck is … Continue reading Enough To Get Home

I go to a sport-themed barber shop these days where all the haircutters are women. Can’t hardly find a lonely-hermit, old-timer still hanging his barber pole outside a run-down storefront. When I was a kid, it was a man’s world, a chance for a guy to read a fishing magazine, maybe josh with a buddy … Continue reading Ladies in the Locker Room

Paul lay on the beach in a sun-baked half-doze. Lake Michigan could do that to him. His way to center himself and lose himself at the same time, if that made sense, in the purling waves pulsing toward him from beyond the horizon.  For thirty-some years his wife and children had come, every summer weekend, … Continue reading Another Nun?

I kept hearing a bang and thump from down in my basement. Had someone left a tennis shoe in the dryer. No, it wasn’t that regular. It was intermittent, at irregular intervals and besides I wasn’t drying any clothes. I eased down the stairs and peeked around the door to the utility room. THUMP. WHACK. … Continue reading A Female Cardinal

We were having a window replaced on a second story room. When the installer arrived, I showed him three different routes through the house to get to the room and the porch beyond. To my surprise, twenty minutes later I could hear sawing and banging but hadn’t seen the guy coming through our home. Curious, … Continue reading Chop-Chop or Easy Breezy

They told me not to travel to Tamasopo. Well not exactly, ‘said’. But I could feel it. I was a college-aged, exchange-student, 1961, living in Mexico City as a guest of a wealthy industrialist in Lomas de Chapultepec, a very exclusive enclave. I read my host’s displeasure in tightened eyes and clenched lips as he … Continue reading Between Two Pools

I would never consider driving the wrong way on a one-way street. And since my daughters ran in high school, I’m aware of the traditional counter-clockwise flow of a track meet. But there is a very nice park 1.5 miles from my house that makes for a convenient morning run along a rambling circular trail. … Continue reading Wrong-Way Runner

“Hey, honey,” my wife said as we barreled along M53, “There’s a park up ahead. Sandy Pines. We’ve never been there.” I had. A year before I met her. 52 years ago. But I didn’t want to tell her that. To get into all that. “Let’s stop for lunch,” she suggested. “The site says there’s … Continue reading Memory Check

You can’t work at a profession all your life and not carry over some telling behavioral traits into retirement. I like to observe elder folk, like me, and try to guess their earlier career—a version of the old TV show: ‘What’s my line?’ but instead ‘What was my line?’ For example: I was in a … Continue reading Professional Tells

 I was on a plane out of Chicago a while back, row 32A next to the window. A lady slides in next to me, carefully arranges her gray wool skirt over her knees, shakes her bobbed, unashamedly silver hair and reaches for a Georgette Heyer paperback from her carry-on bag. Finally, a guy, big as … Continue reading Coach Class Oversharing