Columns

We stopped at a fast-food place where, when you buy a burger, you get to put the mustard and ketchup on yourself. We also bought a side salad and got to pour the French vignette dressing on ourselves.

It was one of those days, when we could smell fall in the air and the change in temperature and climate made us want to go out for a snack rather than cook at home. I guess you could say we were out to butter our own nests.

Something clicks when people are faced with a kind of commonality that matters. The flooding in Las Vegas proves  that such is true.

Let me explain:

I first noticed this we-have-something-in-common phenomenon when I was a few years younger and a student at the University of Missouri. The Columbia campus is so spread out that a bicycle becomes the main means of transportation.

Have a car? Forget it! Some dormitories are a mile from the classrooms.

Not yet 10-years old, the writer and childhood friend David Escudero waited anxiously as the workmen called it a day, then set out to explore the immense playground which had appeared almost overnight on the streets and alleyways of Old Town. Mounds of earth, sand and gravel, bar ditches and trenches and manholes, excavations, large and small, and heavy equipment of every size and purpose, became our paradise — to explore until the sun set and we grudgingly heeded the beckoning calls from home.

We live in interesting times. Times that mankind has never experienced before. Do you ever wonder why you were born into this time?

It seems like every day I receive numerous e-mails in my “Inbox” and I have no idea why I am receiving them. Although most of them are “nonsense,” sometime a few months ago I must have clicked a button somewhere that causes me to regularly receive “Inspirational Quotes.” One day they just started coming in and they have continued to be sent to me ever since.