Category: Uncategorized

It was 1987 and my daughters were 13 and 14.  We had stopped in to see my Grandmother Opal, who lived in a retirement high rise in Colorado Springs.  She was 93 years old and still living independently in a facility where she had outlived every person who had been there when she moved in.  I could write a chapter on Opal, but let me sum up her life by this brief bio: she graduated from what is now the University of Northern Colorado in 1912, in the first class that allowed women to go to college.  She was an…

So I began the morning in the rain at 6am. I was not driving for Lyft but rather playing in a charity golf tournament up in Broomfield. It was a “best ball scramble” tournament which is the only kind of golf match that I would dare show my face in. For those of you not familiar with this format it goes like this: Everyone of the foursome hits their tee shot and then the team plays the best ball from there. What this allows is for a guy like me to contribute to competitive golf. Today I actually hit a…

I am asked about once a month how I found myself in ministry. It’s an interesting question, that has no simple answer. I usually say things like “I backed into it” or “I got one of those TO OCCUPANT invites.” Or “I sucked at golf so I tried something where I could work on Sunday. My son Mateo once said to me in a moment of a 13-year old’s defiance “You only work an hour a week.” I volleyed back “You ought to go into the ministry Mateo, as much as you like to goof around”. “Oh No! Not me!!!…

I found myself volunteering at the 9 News Health Fair way up in northwest Arvada.  One of the great side benefits of Lyft driving is making use of times when you are away from home doing other things, and then turning on the app.  It was a little past 9am and I was headed towards home when the ‘ping’  came.  I pulled up in a cul de sac on this beautiful spring morning.  She came walking out of the house wearing a pink ball cap and sweatshirt.  I could tell from a distance that she had no hair.  Checking the…

She called me right after I pulled up to her Capitol Hill apartment and told me she was running a bit late and that it might take her a couple of extra minutes to get out to the car.  I told her that was fine with me and to take her time.  She got in the front seat, her long brunette hair was shower wet and just combed.  “I am so sorry, I have had a really bad two days.  I missed work yesterday and am running late today.  I work all the way out in Golden so I hope…

(This post was from a couple weeks back. It was inadvertently removed so, I’m putting it back up.) Sometimes I give a ride that makes me think I should have paid the passenger.  I had just such a ride two days ago.  I pulled up on the south end of Wash Park, which is the opposite end from my home.  When I found out the destination was DIA I was a bit surprised, as it is somewhat rare to have a mid-morning airport ride.  My expectation was, the passenger would be half my age, but when I saw him out…

It has taken me these three weeks to process what happened that night. I have put off writing about it until I had some perspective. I was wrapping up a mid-week evening of driving and headed back to my perch at the north end of Washington Park. If you would have asked me 30 years ago where I’d like to live, in my semi-retired life, I very likely would have said on Wash Park, in Denver. That wish seemed like a dream that was pretty far from reality, but by good fortune, hard work, luck and fortuitous timing I am…

“After Midnight we gonna let it all hang out”–Eric Clapton Until I started driving for Lyft in November of 2015, I had maybe heard the clock strike 12am one New Year’s Eve, five years ago. That is no longer the case. Probably three or four times a month I will find myself driving on a weekend night until two or three in the morning.  A couple of times I have even watched the sun go down and come up.  Time flies when you give 23 rides in a night.  The world changes when the moon is in the middle of…

When you spend 25-50 hours in a week in your car, your radio becomes your constant companion.  I don’t have a ‘playlist’ but I do have Sirius XM.  I can move seamlessly from sports talk, to MSNBC, to classical, jazz and old time ‘rock ‘n roll’.  What’s on the radio– I guess I should call it the ‘sound system’, can be background music, sort of like my dentist office, to the focus of the ride.  I can be listening to Rachel Maddow or ‘Big Al and D. Mac’ (nicknamed ‘Dumb and Dumber’ by the world’s best church admin) but when…