Artist and Community Leader
Upon viewing a piece of Tadashi Hayakawa's art I always have the feeling that something important, something central, is lurking just off the canvas. There is an earthy quality to all of his work, a gritty mixture of sand, 
water and the mess of life. But it is also familiar, something you feel you could have created yourself - had you continued painting with the same carefree vision of your youth.
Don't take that as a slight on his work. It isn't. As Tadashi said to me: "Imagination is more important than technique. The art has to express you." Who among us, with all of our responsibilities and pre-conceived notions of the world, expresses ourselves with the freedom we did as a child?
Colonel Mustard With A Candle Stick
William Feathers once said: “Beware of the person who can't be bothered by details.”
Dig deeply into any work of art, any novel of note, and amongst its mountain of details you will find its excellence. Broad ideas, bold strokes, and colorful images are the signal posts of our world and how we navigate it, but it is only in the details that we can truly see its beauty.
Design is no different than any other endeavor. No matter the apparent simplicity of the work, there are always an array of complicit details that make it shine. A professional designer is aware of this and strives with every project to focus on the little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary, the competent from the effective.
The Elephant Man of Loxahatchee
At some point during the day I had to stop and say to myself, “Jack Nicklaus is playing in the group in front of me.” 
No matter that my drive had sailed away to the right and landed behind a tree, leaving me with little hope of advancing the ball forward, let alone to the green.
The fact that it was late Thursday morning at Loxahatchee Golf Club in Florida was irrelevant, except that everyone I knew was working 1400 miles away to make a buck and suffering through a mid-west winter day. But the man playing in front of me three years earlier had completed, arguably, one of the most amazing feats in sport history. He won the Master’s at age 48 – and in dramatic fashion, too.
Vacationing With the Dead
Lindbergh, Da Vinci, Galileo, Martin Luther King, Jr. They thumbed their nose at convention. They spat into the wind and dared it to spit back. Each of them reached beyond the horizon and grabbed tomorrow. Not for themselves. 
Not for posterity. They did it because they had to, because, as Jack London wrote, they "would rather be ashes than dust." These men, and other men and women like them, could not float on the tides and be content to take life as it came. No, they were meant to carry others in their wake. They created the eddies that brought us changes in perspective and forced us all to swim against the current. They made us bigger than our evolutionary roots, bigger than our petty grievances. They gifted to us the human spirit; each one building on his predecessors.
They have always been my heroes. Mavericks, outlaws, malcontents and rebels, each of them. But history shows them to be the very best of what defines us. Forget today's sports heroes. Forget the fifteen minute wonders and the beautiful muses.
Female Math
"It’s all about me!"
Some things are so indelibly etched into our framework of electrical impulses, DNA encoding, and sweat and dreams that we rarely question their rationality, let alone their existence. 
There are times, however, when a psychic knock on the head causes us to stop and look at things anew, to re-focus and examine that which was before seen as a given.
Ms. E. has a way of spinning even the most remote of concepts and situations into our daily lives as if they had always been there, as if they were part of the natural order of things. In fact, she is so adept at this prestidigitation that I have at times incorrectly assumed them to be part of nature's laws.
One Day
He has to be the poster child for his generation, gracefully moving about the stage like someone half his age. In fact, from a distance – like the balcony at the Buell Theatre in Denver, Colorado – 
he appears to be half his age. His graying hair, from the cheap seats, anyway, looks like it was manufactured by the gang in make-up (he's too young to be grey, isn't he?). His voice is still strong and clear and fills the theatre. On this night he is Dr. Doolittle, the monkey-chatting, snake-smacking chap from days gone by. Otherwise, he is known as Tommy Tune, American theatre icon.
The show itself is only somewhat entertaining – to me anyway. The music is wonderful, the lyrics crisp and witty, and the choreography is fun and energetic, but the remainder of the story is lacking. I am not the best judge of the show's
Let it Snow
"So dad," comes the still-tiny voice from the back seat of the car, "when Santa finally gets too old and tired and decides to retire, who will take his place?"
The question is part of the daily barrage the seven-year-old whiz kid throws my way. 
It is early February, the holidays are recent memories and next year’s Yuletide aspirations still occupy Madison’s thoughts.
I'm momentarily caught off guard by the question, but I quickly recover and chuckle softly to myself.
"You know how excited you get when Christmas gets near? How fun it is to see all the pretty lights and snowmen?"
Agents of the Undertow
Take this picture: a young child stands in the half-sunlight beneath a group of large pine trees, reaching out to touch the flowers and smell their spring-time fragrance. 
The child is smiling. The back of her printed dress hangs loosely in the breeze as she bends forward. The picture is a conduit, a reminder of simpler times, of the sun’s warmth and how there are moments when time can stop and the sun can wrap its warm rays around us and coddle us. This momentary sidestep of time that accompanies such episodes--this photo--breathes life into us and connects us, making us aware of the fluidity of existence. This standing still of the world--where the minutest detail is crystal clear--is unexpected but always welcomed.
Hitting Bottom
Madison sat in a sandbox. The sandbox doubled as a volleyball court that went mostly unused. She pushed a plastic shovel into the soft, dried sand, scooped some up and placed it in a pile within easy reach. 
She was dreaming, playing out fantasies and creating worlds. At her age--she was 4 years old then--there was nothing more she could do. She had no experience so she had to create her own realities from the bits and pieces of life that she had picked up along the way. This digging, or dreaming, taught her that anything is possible, that the human mind is a vast expanse with unlimited capabilities. It trained her to reach out into the world with her own thoughts and creativity and construct her own visions. Her imagination wasn’t yet constrained to the limitations experience imposes on us. Her dreams and fantasies were as boundless as her naïveté.
The Value of Things
A short time ago, I received in the mail an inventory booklet from my home insurance agent. It was, of course, blank and asking to be filled in, something I’d avoided too long. Start small, I thought. It will be easier.
Take measure of the little things first, the seemingly insignificant, the ordinary. Progress toward larger stuff and keep a tally along the way. In the end, when the counting is finished and the books have been totaled, there will be a sum and the value of things will be known, ordered. Or so it seemed. As I looked around the house I realized it would be difficult to discern the junk from the treasure. Measuring the value of things is a tricky business, I found, even when their cost is known.
Sunshine Market Souvenirs
The Sunshine Market shows up in the backs of station wagons and temporary tents every Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. in a little park in the heart of Hanapepe, "The biggest little town on Kaua'i". Locally grown fruits and 
vegetables appear for an hour or so, sold by islanders for a fraction of grocery store prices. When fresh, exotic fruit calls, my wife pulls me out the door and we make the short drive from Poipu toward the windward side of the island. The Sunshine Market is not old Hawaii, but it does possess its spirit. In its laid-back approach and in the smiles of the natives who greet us, we can sense something not found in most parts of the isles.
Minutes after a light shower, so common in the tropics, a sugar cane stalk, a bunch of apple bananas, and a bag of impossible-to-crack macadamia nuts have found their way into our bag and my pocketbook. My wife is in search of papayas but we are told we are minutes too late. The Hanapepe Sunshine Market is sold out. So now she tugs at my hand and says, "Collectibles. I want collectibles."
Playing In the Shadows
Winter has come to Evergreen, Colorado. The temperatures no longer threaten the seventy degree mark. Even in the midday sun's warmth there is a hint of deep cold, the suggestion that this is only the beginning of a long 
freeze. This year the snows are arriving late. It is mid-December and yesterday, for the first time, we had continual snow. It didn't amount to much, five or six inches. It was a wet, thick snow that froze on the roads as the temperature dropped.
This time of year when the sun falls to the other side of the mountains the cold invades quickly, leaving no doubt that the seasons have changed. The sun no longer bakes the house as I work. Snow falls in clumps arrhythmically from the branches of the pine trees that surround our house and beats drum-like upon the roof. As if to provide more evidence of the coming weather we have begun boarding a mouse, his presence announced in the form of an empty candy wrapper in a kitchen drawer, crumbs trailing away to places unknown.
Take a look around and let me know if there is anything I can do for you.