All Archived Blog Posts

It is the Winter Solstice. In the cold we huddle around the fire, joined in our communities. At the dark time of year, when the days are short, we celebrate the light. During this time I often imagine ancient peoples in their shelters, with a roof smoke hole above the...

This picture was on a birthday card I received last week. It is a real photo of Rolland “Rollie” Free setting the motorcycle land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats September 13, 1948 eleven months after I was born. Rollie Free raced Indian motorcycles before...

To tell you the truth, I’m exhausted. I mean, I did manage to hold my pee till first light, and that seemed to make my man happy, but it wasn’t easy. I mean, I am so thirsty all the time and I drank a whole bowl since bedtime. But wait, I’m forgetting my manners....

The roots of a love affair When I was a pre-teen, I read a book about Doug, an American teenager immersed in hot rod culture. The story was about Doug finding himself, but was full of descriptions of bored-out V8s and chopped and channeled old Fords, accompanied in my...

First Love My first girlfriend was named Coke, not what you’re thinking. We weren’t fifteen year-old white powder fiends. Her real name was Carolyn. The nickname came from her first attempts at saying her name, but it stuck and she introduced herself, “Hi my name is...

At the Therapist “How has the week gone?” “I don’t know. . . . not going well. . . I’ve been quite anxious. . . can’t get ahead. . . seems to know and is taking the opportunity to be more of a . . .over and over.” “Are you ready to move on? What happened with. . .?”...

Maynard and me Maynard G. Krebs, pictured above, was the sidekick character in The Many Loves of Doby Gillis, the 1959-63 CBS TV series. Dwayne Hickman starred in the title role, and Bob Denver, later of Gilligan’s Island fame, played Dobie’s eccentric friend,...

“I seek dead people” My wife is an amateur genealogist. She spends her retirement researching her extended, extended family. She is a detail person, a puzzler, a rigorous researcher, and a writer. She uses all her skills pursuing records of her long dead relatives....

The trail began in a yellow green wood. “Don’t get your feet wet!” My mother admonished as I leaped across a trickle-stream not bothering with the log bridge. Was I six? Seven? I’m pretty sure it was before Cub Scouts and that was eight. The leaves had just started to...

“Fred?” “Yes, Shishya?” “Why, do you live here?” “Ah, Shishya, the mountains are a transition between earth and sky. How else can the seeker find change but by traversing transition?” “But Fred, the path up here is so strenuous.” “Shishya, Shishya, the road to change...

The Trial I was called for jury duty three times in two years always in spring or fall consulting busy-season. “So just when would be a good time for you, Mr. Culler.” “I’m free the three days before Thanksgiving, your honor.” “Fine. The clerk will schedule you....

He bore the name of the Prophet. We had a little difficulty meeting. I was not in the place he expected me to be and the app-map did not have all the street names. The dealership called him, a service meant to offset labor prices double what I usually pay. There was...

Jake and Wil save German culture The “Little Corporal” was ruining everything. Napoleon Bonaparte abolished the feudal system; peasants duties to the manorial class were reduced or eliminated.  The lingua franca, or trader’s tongue, that was a combination of Italian...

Stuff Needs Fixing The lamp is twelve years old. It was a gift from a family member because it went with our last house, an Arts & Crafts fairy-hut in a stately home neighborhood about two miles from where we now live. It does have a Dirk Van Erp vibe, the San...

The LinkedIn Wisdom Elders I’m connected on LinkedIn to several men about my age or a little older who write posts like I do. Some also have weekly newsletters on LinkedIn where they publish slightly longer pieces, similar to what to these pieces on Wisdom from...

The joke is on me There is a joke I first heard in my teenage years. Like a lot of jokes it is hard to make work in written form. The jokester asks: ”What’s the secret of good comedy?” Then as the person starts to speak “Well I think…,” he screams “TIMING!” It is a...

Poor Oedipus Born in Thebes, Oedipus was left to die on a mountaintop because a seer told Laius and Jocasta, his parents, that this infant was a threat to the throne. In real life he would have just died of exposure, another unfortunate unwanted child statistic, but...

The Day After Christmas When I was growing up in 1950s New England, the day after Christmas was a recovery day. Kids played with toys that weren’t broken yet. If there was snow, boys went outside for sledding, and snowfort snowball fights. If it was cold and not much...

 House of Cards We send holiday cards. My list includes people I’m only in contact with once a year so I usually include a little handwritten note with some news. Not always; I sometimes run out of steam. So I’ve learned to start at the “A’s one year and the ‘Z’s the...

Kid stuff I’ve been reading Aesop’s Fables. Most of us read some of Aesop’s stories as children: the conceited hare so impressed with his own speed that he took many diversions and even a nap and so lost the race to the slow but steady tortoise. This left us with a...

A Rant I’m not really a rant-kinda-guy, no really, I’m not. . . Whined the wishy-wash writer-wrestling with what the wrecked-world hath wrought . . . Resistance is futile . . .a least, . . . that’s what “they” say . . . So ranters gonna rant, rant, and rant, and  I...

I wrote a rant to post this week. Then Dennis reposted a BizCat article I wrote six months ago where I was genuinely asking what we might start doing  about the “Problems of the World.” It was written by my less-cynical self, who grabbed my grumpy-old-man self-by the...

I already wrote about my strange obsession with the Celts, a European Bronze Age and Iron Age people  dominant between 700 BCE and 77 CE. In 51 CE, Julius Caesar “pacified” Gaul. The first slaughter of druids on Anglesey (Mona) in Wales the home of the last druid...

Will, Marne, and Surance When William Wehn was younger he left his parents farm. Will was the third son and knew his brothers would inherit the small family plot. William travelled, working where he could, mucking out some farmers barn, helping bind and thresh wheat...

The first math problem. My parents were married for sixty-seven years. They got married in the depths of the Great Depression, which I always thought was the heights of optimism. They were very different people. Dad was an extravert; my mother described him as...

Celt-crazy after all these years I’m not sure when I became fascinated by the Celts, the Bronze and Iron Age people, who fought Julius Caesar as the Gauls. I know I was young, teen or preteen. I grew up in a Boston suburb and suddenly Celtic didn’t just describe the...

Ancient History “Oh Wow!” Human beings have gotten cricks in our necks staring at the night sky for a long time. The Lascaux caves in France, dating from 30,000 years ago have a graphical representation of the Pleiades; a carved mammoth ivory tusk carbon dated to...

Acme Grand Opening It was a sunny spring Saturday and I was on a roll. When I worked, Saturdays were all about errands and it was only ten-fifteen and, man, I was checking things off the old index card to-do list to beat the band. I’d dropped and picked up shirts and...

A conversation It was a story I heard more than once. Different people told the story often making a slightly different point. Some told it to make the Great Gatsby point, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Some told the story...

Eeeyou! That is how many people react to bugs. They’re disgusting, disease-spreading, creepy-crawly creatures. Perhaps the feeling is mutual; there is little reliable data about how insects react to humans. They may be conflicted; we are both food source and predator...

July 4th - US Independence Day Amid the fireworks and cookouts, Ferris wheels, cotton candy and win-a-stuffie pellet-gun booths at Lion’s Club sponsored carnivals,  amid the politicians’ speechifying, “hooray-for-our-side-doncha ever-vote-for-them-evil-bastards-agin,”...

I call myself a writer now. Sometimes words flow like a river; sometimes they are dammed up. Not elegantly locked behind a Grand Coulee-Hoover architectural-engineering wonder, but stuck in mud and sticks and crumpled leaves emerging in tiny trickles from the...

“I hope I die before I get old” Well, that didn’t happen. Not for me nor for Pete Townshend, who wrote that song for The Who’s debut album released in 1965, the year I graduated from high school. I remember the song, though I was blissfully unaware that it had been...

My First: Tank My first summer at Oyster Harbors Caddy Camp I was thirteen. I was slow to learn and reluctant to work, but with help of an older caddy, I finished strong and was voted “Most Improved Camper.” I learned to hustle, earned respect from the caddy-master...

My haircutter history When a was a curly tow headed two-year-old my hair drew a lot of attention. I’m told I was not happy with my first haircut. I bawled uncontrollably when my father took me to his barber shop, which amused the barber.  They finally gave me a cookie...

“I’m going to be a big brother” My son and his bride are anticipating the birth of their second child. With their first, they wanted to be surprised, so they dove into the name selection ritual for two genders. “No not Louisa; I went to elementary school with a Louisa...

Maybe The fourth time the disembodied phone-tree voice said “Please give me the phone number on the account” and I answered, she said “You seem to be having trouble. Good-bye.” The ensuing dial tone caused me to swear. “Again?” My wife poked her head into my office....

“He was only ever interested in music and the transfer of energy, which he considered the same thing.” This is a line written about Josiah Fells, the father in the Showtime series “The Man Who Fell to Earth.“ This series is based upon the 1963 Walter Nevis novel, of...

Leonardo and me About five years ago I read Walter Isaacson’s biography Leonardo da Vinci. I remember buying it for my Kindle and then returning it and buying hard copy because I couldn’t see the pictures.  I’ve always been fascinated by this Renaissance...

Don’t take it personally, Alan. Now that I am three quarters of a century old, I get a little testy at this time of year. This whole Father Time Old Year, receding into the night and swaddling-wrapped pudgy Baby New Year bursting forth into the sunrise makes me feel a...

Deep Winters Night Green long ago departed the hardwood leaves now brown-skittering across the threshold in the white wind. Deep Winter’s Night is coming. Imagine early people. Even those attuned to the cycle, the wise ones who had lived many seasons, quailed as the...

“Eeeeeeerip” “Did you hear that?” “Yeah, I think it was my foot moving that chair.” “Oh. Good ‘cause I thought it. . .” “Eeeeeeerip” “Definitely was a smoke alarm.” “But we just changed the battery a month ago.” “Maybe it’s one downstairs. . . “Eeeeeeerip” “Nope. It...

I Dare You I quit smoking cigarettes on a dare when I was twenty-seven. My then wife and I were playing Risk with our friends Steve and Roberta. Steve smoked Winstons, Kirsten and I smoked Marlboros. I don’t remember that Roberta smoked. I think I started the group...

Yep, 75. I have now reached the age that when I die, no one will say “He was so young!” I’m in the third phase of life “Youth, Middle Age, and. . . ‘Good for You!’” or ‘God Bless You!’ or ‘You Look Great!’ What people really mean is “and you’re not dead yet? -freakin’...

“Gotta work a rabbit’s foot” That’s what my father said when he hung strips of aluminum foil from his tomato plants to keep the squirrels from eating his tomatoes before they were dead ripe and pickable. Or when he rigged a bailing wire loop in his shop to organize...

Going to the Circus “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Please turn your attention high above the center ring . . . Hush. . .” "High above ladies and gentlemen on the trapeze and working without a net, the lovely Belinda will now attempt a triple somersault into the waiting hands...

Artifacts of "The Boy" When I cleaned out my parents’ house I discovered that my mother saved everything that had any significance to my growing up. In 1998 my parents moved from assisted living to a nursing home and my sisters and I cleaned out the family home which...

Learning to juggle In my early forties, I decided to learn how to juggle. I asked for the book Juggling for the Complete Klutz for my birthday and my daughter Tegan obliged and gave to me. Her inscription alludes to the “Culler Curse,” which  is a certain clumsiness....

“Read line 6. . . . pretty good!” “Now the left, Line 4. . . 6. . .  9. . .13. . . Read that again. . . are there hawks in your family?” “Now the right. . .  4?  The first line?. . . Oh. ho. HO! A Blyndee!” I was twenty-three and having the first headaches of my life....

“Oh, will you grow up!” I heard this a lot as a boy, especially from my two older sisters. Perhaps to counter their disapproval, or through some genetic trait or developmental defect, I acquired an attitude toward life that can be best summed up by what a boss said to...

“That’s just WRONG!” I was stunned. Twenty-one and newly married, I was living with a member of the opposite sex who wasn’t my mother or my sister for the first time. “LOOK, I appreciate that you changed the toilet paper roll when you used the last of it, but you are...

Joy bursts from a neo-being and is absorbed and amplified by an adoring ancestor. Later, the child hangs on the parent’s last breath silently hoping for last guidance or “intimations of immortality.” “From the mouths of babes.” “From beyond the grave.” First and last...

Raymond J. Culler, my father, gave me my first pocketknife when I was 11 years old. He said that his father told him at around that age that “a man should always have a pocketknife in his pocket.” I liked the knife; I liked that he called me ‘a man’. And because I had...

 What is wisdom? Knowledge? Skill? I don't think all knowledge or skill qualifies as wisdom, but perhaps it is the kind of knowledge that comes from hard-knock, mistake-riven experience and the kind of skill that comes from great practice, repeated until the hands...

A New York management consultant was feeling lost. He didn’t understand life anymore. He could no longer speak with complete confidence when giving advice to clients. Someone told him of a wise old man who lived in a cave in the high Himalayas. The old man would tell...