Back When
Love Bites Sam and I drive back to the dog room in El Cajon. By now, Sam has racked up a total bill (vets, food, clothes, general destruction, trainer, vaccination shots, equipment) in excess of …
Big Bite Gary Sehnert works as the United States representative and distributor for several wineries in the Guadalupe Valley ten miles inland from Ensenada. Though he operates from his home in Little Italy, his job …
Fat Girl: A True Story I wrote Fat Girl because I'd read books that other fat women wrote about how they were fat. Most fat women didn't write the truth about fat. They didn't write …
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote "Why did Capote dislike Gore Vidal so much?" "He didn't dislike Vidal so much. He didn't hate Vidal the way Vidal hated him. They rubbed each …
In Lakeside, Chickens Make Good Neighbors You can't use your nose to find the ranch because the sharp ammonia odor you may associate with chicken farms is absent. Harold Hilliker, second-generation owner of Hilliker's Egg …
All in the Family This story begins in 1951, with a brief liaison between Margaret Helen Kinney and John Hunt. She was a stenographer and he was a clerk at Borden dairy company in Cedar …
With the End of Humans, What Will Happen to the Gorilla? Actually it was three months ago, my mother’s death, I mean. I just found out about it on Friday. No one in my family …
Crop Failure The most obvious damage done to a movie that has been trimmed, cropped, to fit the TV space, is to the composition of the images. It is like a museum trying to fit …
Developers Eye Sleepy Descanso It's only 35 or 40 minutes from downtown San Diego to the junction of Interstate 8 and State Route 79. And just a couple of minutes north of there lies the …
Grisly Grinders in Wildcat Canyon Goodwin acknowledges that Wildcat Canyon has developed a reputation for being a dangerous drive and offers this explanation. "It's a two-lane roadway, it's very windy, it's up and down. Maybe …
I'd Never Marry a Pale Girl On a sunny afternoon in June, Mark Davis is peeling off the top of his wetsuit after taking a swim at La Jolla Shores. Davis, 23, just returned to …
Tijuana Dream Tracker "Just like Florence, just like Rome, Tijuana, too, has its monuments." Professor Julio Rodríguez steers his blue Ford through Zona Rio, gesturing at one statue after another. "And what are monuments? What …
Generations My mother was a jazz fan. Her mother, Florence Hawkins, sang onstage (her signature piece was "My Man Bill"), and her showgirl aunt, Caroline Snowden, was a name star in the earliest moments of …
H is for Hacker Like many hackers, David Nakamura Hulton goes by more than one name. His other one, his handle, is h1kari. Some people say you shouldn’t ask a hacker what his handle means. …
Surfer Girls Female wave-addiction pioneers. Some women have always surfed. Three hundred years ago, Hawaiians of both sexes rode the waves, and when the sport moved beyond the islands, when the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku in …
The Guest is Like God One Sunday in November 1989, Barry Lall, an Indian-American doctor, was driving over the Coronado Bridge with his wife Hema, their four-year-old son Arjun, Lall's father and mother, and a …
Reina's Story North County's sex slaves. In April 2001, 15-year-old Reina was leaving her home in Tenancingo, a high-plateau town west of Mexico City. She was happier than she’d been in a while, traveling north …
Site 151’s Four Million Dollar Mansion Wealth has nothing to do with luck. Ralph Genovese doesn't use the word "mansion" to describe the three dwellings he will construct on a mountaintop in Rancho Santa Fe. …
Crash, Crash, Crash A handsome rookie roars around Cajon Speedway. Like two dancers executing half a pirouette, the two 3000-pound late-model Sportsman-class stock cars spun out side by side, squealing their tires, as their rear …
The Death of Judy Huscher The body lies in a position of repose, a 12-year-old girl in pajamas, on her bed, in Fallbrook, California. Her blue eyes, though open, see nothing, and for ten more …