Dani: Thursday, Oct. 18, 12:24 pm I give my carry-on and the bin holding my desert boots and water bottle a shove, and wave down the pasty TSA agent manning the body-scanning machine. “I’m opting out,” I tell him. “You’re opting out of this technology?” he asks,...

“You got a lot of hate mail on that last column.” I was standing in a parking lot on St. Michael’s Drive watching my son London step in front of a solar panel the size of an oven door when a stranger approached me. Part of a neighborhood re-visioning celebration, the...

I don’t have a Twitter account, never donated to any Kickstarter projects and my flip phone forces me to text like a 13-year-old girl living in 2001. But I believe in social media. I have used Facebook to make announcements (yard sales, favorite articles) and...

My friend Nell once told me that Taos was put on this Earth to remind people to slow down. I return to the “soul of the Southwest” each summer to attend a conference, and this remark rings truer than anything I ever learned in Catholic school. Some days, I...

Dear Graduating Class of 2012, First, let me say how saddened I was to hear about your original commencement speaker’s unfortunate accident in the batting cage with the defective pitching machine. Wow. They say once the swelling goes down, the doctors will be...

Amaury Torres has a dream. I have one, too. OK, so his is far more inspirational, starting in 1994 on a raft leaving Havana, Cuba, and traveling through Guantánamo, Panama and Miami before ending up on Highway 14 in the San Marcos area south of Santa Fe. You can read...

“Don’t know why you care how I make my money,” my daughter Poppy said during a quarrel about spending cash, hard work and the injustices my wife and I endured under parents whose version of a surprise party consisted of signing you up for jobs you...

Just last week in one of my English classes, the highschooligans and I were discussing a central character in Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. When this fictional woman was born, her father chose her name blindly out of the Bible, and she ended up with the...

This is how cute I think I am: Before I go driving with my 15-year-old daughter, Poppy, I burn a CD of songs loosely related to piloting an automobile. The playlist runs the gamut from “Sober Driver” by Dengue Fever to one of Poppy’s favorites:...

This Christmas, in addition to jeggings and Nerf hatchets, my children Poppy and London also received gifts from a friend who had been in the Middle East visiting family. Poppy’s bounty included sweets from far-off lands, a tube of Jordanian lipstick that...