The big American flag flying over the sprawling New York Presbyterian Hospital complex in Washington Heights opposite my Edgewater New Jersey home was straight as iron, pointing left to right. A Nor-Easter was stiffening the banner, rustling the trees of Jay Hood Wright’s picturesque little park around the base of the buildings, including the famous Little Red Lighthouse and riling the great river below.

Weather is more personal and dramatic when you live on a big river like the Hudson. It has heft, especially when the wind blows down from the north. Wind from that point of the compass is channeled by the Highlands near West Point, by Storm King Mountain and the Palisades, and by the time the breeze reaches the George Washington Bridge and enters New York Harbor it is sharp and wet. Pushed by tide and by that wind, waves, two, three footers run down to break on the shoals and docks on the Jersey side.

It was going to be a bumpy ride.

The massacre at Fort Hood Thursday afternoon curiously caused me to flashback to my childhood, rather than my experiences as a war correspondent. After my family moved during the 1950's 'Ozzie and Harriet' era from Brooklyn to West Babylon Long Island, becoming the neighborhood's first Latino family, my dad used to say a little prayer whenever there was a particularly notorious crime. "Please God that the person responsible not be another Puerto Rican." Fighting discrimination and trying to overcome post-World War II-era discrimination as well as our new neighbors' hesitation to welcome our urban brood into their suburban midst, dad saw every act of infamy or notoriety committed by someone who looked like us or who had a name like ours' as an impediment to our ultimate integration.

The massacre at Fort Hood Thursday afternoon curiously caused me to flashback to my childhood, rather than my experiences as a war correspondent.  After my family moved during the 1950's 'Ozzie and Harriet' era from Brooklyn to West Babylon Long Island, becoming the neighborhood's first Latino family, my dad used to say a little prayer whenever there was a particularly notorious crime.

"Please God that the person responsible not be another Puerto Rican."

Fighting discrimination and trying to overcome post-World War II-era discrimination as well as our new neighbors' hesitation to welcome our urban brood into their suburban midst, dad saw every act of infamy or notoriety committed by someone who looked like us or who had a name like ours' as an impediment to our ultimate integration.

During late summer, Southeastern New England is among the most beautiful places on earth particularly for sailors. Away from the smog-generating cities to the North and West, the air is blue clear, the trees vivid green and the horizon far away. Our latest trip this past weekend up to Buzzard's Bay and Martha's Vineyard was affected by several hurricanes Bill, Danny and Barack Obama. Actually the president's vacation trip was the peg (excuse) for doing last weekend's shows from Edgartown on the Vineyard. The Saturday program was actually done in a driving rain from the deck of Voyager, the old sailboat the family and I sailed around the world and 1,400 miles up the Amazon River before the 9/11 attacks changed the world.

Hi everybody, long time no talk. But that's going to change beginning right now. In the era of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the other electronic message carriers, I've been asleep at the wheel, grumpily insisting that what the world needs is fewer writers and more readers, and so keeping most of my opinions either on the air or to myself. In the meantime, along with you I've watched as everyone from failed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to CNN's tiny Rick Sanchez has abandoned or neglected their presumed real-life professions, politics and journalism respectively, and instead become trekkers in the virtual reality of the internet; chatting and Tweeting up a storm, in Sanchez' case on an almost hourly basis.