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On the road...again!!! Afghanistan to Zambia Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Demise of Donald B. Overrocker   You don’t get to know many people well in Basic Training, and that was true for Overrocker. The short period of a couple of months saw us together on five-mile...

  On the road...again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek    3 Rattlesnakes, 1 Eyelash Viper, and a King Cobra   At times it takes the threads of eidetic fragments of memory to stitch together a chronicle that is worth putting on paper. The dream...

On the road...again!!!Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek   Mental Notes, Map Notes, and Aspirational Notes   Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Footloose Forester usually had a plan, or planned to make a plan.  The next destination might be the travel plan for next...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek     Walter Van Tillburg Clark   A quick word search of the name above would turn up references to an author whose most famous novel was The Ox-bow Incident. This impromptu chronicle is not about Clark, the author, but about...

On the road...again!!!Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek  Placerville, One Stop on the Road of Forest Consultancy   It must have been the spring of 1964 when the Footloose Forester returned to Placerville, California. In a recent dream, he recalled showing up before sunrise at a...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek   Would You Believe It, If I Told You?   Would you believe that…a lawmaker in Indiana wants to prosecute doctors who perform abortions?   Would you believe that abortion was legal in the US for over 40 years?    ...

  On the road…again!Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek   Unbelievable Tales   Isaac Azimov wrote more than 500 books.  In his fruitful career, he also managed to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry.  So, when a colleague at the car rental company said that the Footloose Forester...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek     Playing Bumper Cars Around The Moon   It was a bright moon-lit night and the Footloose Forester could hardly look away as he approached the side door to his basement apartment in Auburn, California.  He was probably returning from...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek  Lake Tahoe, Silver Dollars, and Piñon Pine   Those halcyon days working as a consultant forester in California in the 1960s salted the memory banks of the Footloose Forester with many, many fond reveries of adventures.  Some jobs were hundreds of...

On the road…again!!!Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek   Drinkin’ an’ Drivin’   The large refrigerator magnet sent to the Footloose Forester by a female friend (the Best Friend of the deceased Bengal Tiger) was definitely one kitchen item trying to make a point.  She knew that...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Where Am I?   The main thought running through his head in another of those disjointed dreams was, “where am I?”  A sunny scene flashed by, a few loaded words, another scene in a plain,...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek     Ghost Towns   Part of the allure of being On the road…again!!! in so many rural places was the anticipation of knowing that there were going to be a few ghost towns here and there.  Most of them are...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek   Mantras That Endure Of the many would-be chronicles that have struggled toward a birth on paper, this one about spiritual attachment to mantras, has kicked and squirmed its way, finally, to a nascent birth. The personal mantras of the Footloose Forester have...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   The K-Turn and Mountain Roads   Our family has a long tradition of learning how to drive from other family members and we all recall episodes of the lessons.  The Footloose Forester takes pride in teaching things, and...

On the road…again!!!Afghanistan to Zambia Chronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek   Googling Pyramid Peak   Another day, another dream, and another chronicle about nagging problems.  The long-festering issue about which screen capture photos from the Internet are free of copyright restrictions welled up again in last night’s dream. Among...

  Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Aesthetic Trees Legacy trees evolve from singular or group specimens that have had, or will become, historical, cultural, or botanical icons.  The mystique and mystery of remote forests of towering giants, the wildness of tropical jungles, and the...

On the road...again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Those Fruitful Lunch Hours   Over the years, the Footloose Forester had developed a modus operandi for achieving some of his planned free time activities.  He was not unlike other people who had both...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Resentment-update Why do acts of resentment linger in our memories?  We remember our most shameful acts, we remember our failings, and we remember our most embarrassing moments.  And it is also indisputable that at some level of consciousness, we...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   KMB662…939…4-16   He remembers faces and most names, but not all.  Those mental blocks explain a person’s propensity to block certain unpleasant memories but do not explain the inability to recall happy events from the past. When it...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek    The Dirty Rifle   Every company in the training battalion at Fort Ord, California had an ongoing but unspoken competition for best company in each training cycle.  Basic Training in the US Army in those days of the...