Some men are born hermits. They don’t mind spending the rest of their lives in a solitary existence.
I am not that kind of man.
Yet, in Japan I was by default. Not in the sense that I was out in a shack in the middle of forest all by my lonesome, but in my style of existence. My little house, squatted at the edge of the railroad with waving seas of green rice stalks on three sides. On the other side I had a neat little rows of brown, clay shingled …

By Lindsey Williams
In real life there is often a thin line between tragedy and mystery. Such are the circumstances surrounding the fate of Flight 19 recalled by the recent recovery of a World War II Navy torpedo bomber from the sea bottom near Key West.
Treasure salvor Mel Fisher and his crew found the corroded plane 16 years ago while searching for the Spanish galleon Atocha. Having, brought up several million dollars worth of gold and jewels from the ancient ship, Fisher lifted the more modern wreckage to view once more.
By …

My first day of teaching broke early and hot, but I was already up. It is a habit with me, to wake before my alarm, the morning of momentous events. I sleep restlessly, waking several times during the night with the fear that I have missed my alarm, missed the event I have prepared for so much. I have never actually missed a single such event, but this perfect track record doesn’t help ease the fear that this next time will be the first. That morning I woke five minutes …

When life frustrates me with a problem I cannot solve, I often turn to tidying up. I am not a tidy person by nature. I sometimes leave clothes lying around in folded piles. I stack books in haphazard piles on the floor near my bed rather than on my book shelves. Unopened mail accumulates on my nightstand. But when I am frustrated or stuck, I often begin to clean. I shred the credit card offers and crumple the adverts and pack away the greeting cards in boxes for a later …

For much of my life I have always stood out, but not necessarily for the best of reasons.
In my little league picture I stood out. Our team name was Golden Fish. It’s not a bad name, but it’s not exactly the Pirates or the Rangers. Those are cool names. The Pirates wear black and gray uniforms, the rangers wear blue and white. Those are cool colors especially when you are eight, but they weren’t our colors. We wore white baseball pants and yellow shirts with a big black goldfish …