Sterling Griggs

Costco Wholesale Warehouse is an absolute gold mine around lunch time. Vendors set up  tables all over the mammoth store, hawking all sorts of samples ranging from vitamin juice  shots to mini crab cakes. I used to make sure that I would go there with the kids so that we  would have at least one day when we didn’t have to meal plan.      I don’t shop there all the time because we simply can’t afford to. Not that the prices are bad,  it’s just that I don’t know when to stop. Instead, I will go every month or so to stock up on bulk  supplies of juice boxes, salsa, pizza rolls, peanut butter, and whatever items I am convinced  that my family cannot live without.        Perhaps the biggest, if only, drawback to Costco is that it is always crowded. Every aisle is  clogged with shoppers pushing oversized carts full of their choice of essential goods and,  while no one is necessarily rude about...

When I was a kid the world around me was unique and often intimidating. The mall where my parent's shopped was this huge complex of endless stores and easy places for kids like me to get lost. Fast food restaurants were exotic stops reserved for special occasions where I could peek over the counter as the workers whipped up a milkshake for me while steaming hot fries awaited me beside a fresh made burger. Even my backyard appeared as big as a football field on which I could wear my little self out everyday running and playing with my brothers and my friends. As easy as it is to romanticize about the "good old days," it's also easy to realize that those places and events weren't so exquisite as I once believed. I can now walk from one end of the mall to the other in a matter of minutes and there are virtually no stores in which I would choose to venture, much less get lost in. Those milkshakes, fries, and burgers are certainly not a treat anymore and the older I...

Yesterday Chris Cornell, an icon from my younger days as a seeker of real music, died. I remember when his band Soundgarden first came out with their heavy, grimy guitar riffs and his unmistakable voice driving their songs all along the spectrum of vocal abilities - it blew my mind! I will admit that my air guitar game was strong in those days. The early 1990's were a time when bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots were swooping in to rescue all of us from the nefarious clutches of hair metal and the really bad 1980's electronic stuff that they tried to pass off as music. I'm not too biased, am I? As I get older I will inevitably experience the loss of those who not only entertained me in my younger years but also those whom I knew personally. Many of my friends have lost one or both parents and all of my grandparents have already passed on. Every once in a while social media lets me know that someone I knew in high school or college has succumbed to...

What is going on with all this retro stuff that America is going crazy with? Everywhere you look, someone is trying to kick it old school and go back in time. There is the 1980's-ET-sythesizer-inspired Stranger Things show on Netflix (which is awesome, by the way) that pretty much everyone I know who graduated high school in the 1980's is gaga about. The newer Progressive insurance commercials are all now filmed as retro 1970's spots. Then there are movies - how many remakes of older movies are we gonna see? Hello Ghostbusters and Poltergeist , not to mention War Games , Commando , and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids which are just a few that are in the process of being remade. And oh my word, there are the clothing and music styles. The 1980's absolutely haunt me at times, not because it was such a bad decade but because my style was so pitiful. I had hair then, amazing blonde hair with a natural wave to it. But I parted that hair down the middle and heavily hair spray...

I didn't sleep in much during the summers when I was a kid, not when there was so much to do each day. From the moment I finished my bowl of Froot Loops in the morning until the sun went down and I knew to come home when I heard my mom hollering for me, summers were made for playing outside. My neighborhood was filled with other kids close to my age, so there was never a shortage on things to do and places to explore. But without a doubt my fondest summer memories involved the Sandihill Swimming Pool that we joined when I was in kindergarten. Sandihill was unlike any other swimming pool on the planet. It wasn't Olympic size or some luxurious, gated private club. Instead, it was a pool tucked away in a neighborhood next to ours that felt like the best kept secret. What made that pool so special was the people and the memories that were made there. It was there that I learned to swim, not because I took lessons but rather because I jumped into the shallow end one day and figured ...