Showing posts from 2018

Going Home

We have news. I'm taking early retirement from Linfield and Carolyn and I are moving back to NY next Summer.

That's a relief. I'm glad I got that out there.

I suppose some explanation is in order. OK, maybe a lot. This will take a few posts but here's the run-up.

A few days before Thanksgiving, Linfield offered early retirement packages to college staff of a certain age. Being of that certain age, I was given a severance offer. My initial response was "It's too little, too soon." Both those things were true.


We had been talking about moving East for some time. So we tried it on over the holidays. While we were wearing it around, we were able to sort of detach ourselves from the habit of living here and be honest with ourselves about how we felt about it. The truth is, we're in a rut. We're bored and we're lonely and we want to go home. NY is home. Always was. Now that my sister has moved back there and Maddie is living in Colorado, we ha…


After almost 10 years of writing about the mountain bike races I do, I understand that by now, writing a detailed description of each race I do is pointless. I'm doing the same races I've done for years so the descriptions are largely the same except that I seem to be getting a bit worse at them each year and even at my best I was never good enough to add the necessary excitement to them to make them worth reading. Reading about someone who repeatedly comes in last is a bit, um, demoralizing.

So why bother writing about them at all? More to the point, why do them?

I was thinking about that as I started out for my last lap of the Oregon 24 last Saturday night. I was only doing the 12 hour race this time. The last time I did the 24 hour race two years ago I made the podium but it was the first time I felt something had gone really wrong with my body by the finish. Last year I intended to do the 12 hour race but it snowed 15" and it was crazy and actually kind of fun but no…


I should begin by saying I was never wired to enjoy high school reunions. They share a slightly guilt infested part of my brain with California Interstate fruit inspection stations. I know fruit inspection stations are important for protecting California's crops, and it's not much of an inconvenience to stop and talk to the inspectors, but I'd rather not have them find the bag of apples I stashed in the trunk. They let me through and then I feel like crap for lying about what's in my car. Then I spend the rest of the year waiting for news of a new blight that wiped out the California apple crop that was caused by some scumbag tourist from Oregon with fly infested apples. The opportunity to see the people you grew up with should be a blessing, but if fills me with dread that they'll find out I didn't really amount to much and after a few minutes I'm kind of boring and God help them if I start talking about my job. Afterward, I just dread the pictures that co…


Dear Joe,




Travels With Joe Part II



Travels with Joe


I think he's skiing today.



Daryl Hoffman

September will be my 40th high school reunion. It's funny, but for all the things I've experienced, all the people I've known and the places I've seen; I'm still tied to those people and those years in the late '70's in Rondout Valley in upstate New York. I was always a bit of an outsider there. We moved to Stone Ridge when I was in 4th grade and it felt a bit like wandering into a conversation that had started a long time ago. But I found friends and though most of us didn't stay in touch until Facebook showed up, they have turned out to be durable friends. I suppose we were bound to measure ourselves against the people we knew in high school. But I've also grown to realize these people defined home, the place I left in 1978. It felt like we were just figuring out how much we cared for each other right about when we graduated.

This reunion has a good deal of momentum behind it, thanks to Facebook. As we've become reacquainted in the last coupl…

Some thoughts on the road's end


