What's in Dave's Head

A number of years ago I was director of corporate communications for a developer of large shopping and entertainment complexes. It was an exciting time, as we were expanding aggressively in the U.S. and making inroads in Europe. My job was to get positive coverage in national business media, like The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, that could drive up our stock price, or in local media that could help us get approvals or build consumer excitement for development projects. One of our projects, Madrid Xanadu, opened in 2003. I got to make a few trips to Spain to work with a local public relations firm to make sure the press (there wasn’t much in the way of electronic media then) adequately covered our development milestones – regulatory approvals, groundbreaking, tenant signings, and so forth. One of the early milestones was obtaining the tract of land the mall would be built on. We had put a deposit on the land, about 20 miles outside the city in an area called Arroyomolinos, with a

 Each January humorist Dave Barry does a month-by-month recap of the previous year. The format has gotten a little stale, but he will have plenty of material for the edition covering 2020. It’s hard to put in words what a disaster 2020 has been. We’ll be telling our grandchildren about what it was like: The life-altering pandemic. The economic shutdown. Wildfires and hurricanes. The rise of white supremacists. Police shootings of unarmed black men recorded on bodycams. Protests and rioting. The unbridling of a toxic, intolerant, virulent and hate-filled culture. A highly polarizing president and other abominations. This year has a lot of similarities to 1968, another year of extreme turmoil (and a divisive presidential election) that I remember well as a twelve-year-old. In 1968 the Vietnam War was raging, and two iconic American figures were gunned down – Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who was about to become the Democratic presidential nominee. The war was

My mother-in-law Joan O’Keeffe Harding passed away a month short of her 90 th  birthday, on Sept. 13, 2020. It was a Sunday, her favorite day of the week. Joan was an extraordinary woman who had a larger-than-life impact on me. She welcomed me into the family as one of her own children and  went out of her way to make me feel a part of it, one of the gr eat gifts of my life. Faith and family were the unshakable cornerstones of Joan’s life. Her creed was, have fait h, be good, and be confident, and that trinity of interrelated attributes defined and directed her.  While church was where she participated in public worship, she demonstrated Christian values every day. She was enormously kind. She never in my presence spoke ill of  anyone. She found the positives of everyone and every situation. She was generous and welcoming and genuinely grateful of her many blessings. Despite her many talents – she was a star athlete, learned grammarian, master diplomat, skilled administrator – she neve

I went to college many years ago at Washington College in Chestertown, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Life on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay is like a different world from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., where I grew up: a much slower pace, fewer people, more agrarian. I remember marveling that at the town’s one stoplight (there are more now as the village has grown), when the light turned green, the driver of the first car (if in fact there was more than one car in line) would proceed in due time in a leisurely fashion, and the other motorists would patiently wait to go. What’s the rush? Imagine that scenario playing out in my hometown of Rockville, or any densely populated suburb. I have a lot of fond memories of W.C., as it was then known (today it is referred to as WAC). Everything was in walking distance, so many of us didn’t have cars, at least until junior or senior year. We would walk to friends’ off-campus house on Saturday nights to watch a new gro

The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted everyone’s life. We all have a responsibility to practice social distancing by sheltering in place and all the rest. Over the past week, my anxiety about the novel coronavirus has increased at roughly the same rate as the virus’s exponential spread. I worry that my wife, our children and theirs could become sick. So far, I don’t know anyone who has contracted it; a person who works in the same building as me tested positive (I don’t know who and was told that we won’t be contacted unless we were believed to be in contact with them), and the friend of one of my brothers-in-law lost his dad to COVID-19 a few days ago. It’s just a matter of time before it hits close to home. As far as impacts on me, they are relatively minor. We are fortunate: I still have my job. We have food. Our daughters and their families are close by so we can visit them (our son and his wife are in lockdown in L.A.). We can stay in touch with friends and family thr

A frequent topic of news articles here in America and elsewhere in the West is about China being a “surveillance state.” Sample headlines include:           “’The Entire System is Designed to Suppress Us’: What the Chinese Surveillance State Means for the Rest of the World” – Time , Nov. 21, 2019           “Big Brother is watching: inside China, the ultimate surveillance state” – The Times of London , May 26, 2019             “Inside China’s surveillance state” – Financial Times , July 2018           “Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras” – The New York Times , July 8, 2018 China’s authorities keep tabs on citizens’ whereabouts and activities at all times. National police use facial-recognition glasses, hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in public places, a database of citizens’ voices, artificial intelligence and big data analytics monitor its population. While we aren’t there yet in the U.S., our privacy is quickly evaporating,

The Washington Post’s chief arts critic, Philip Kennicott, is publishing a memoir that looks at the connection between mourning and music, based on his experience following the death of his mother. The Post published an excerpt of the book in the Sunday, Feb. 16 edition. I won’t get into the music aspect of Kennicott’s piece, but he said something that hit home to me. He noted that his mother was unhappy throughout her life, and he wondered what her final cogent moments were like – was she relieved to be dying and to be separated from her sadness? Was she terrified to think there was no afterlife (she was an ardent atheist) or at peace to think that there was about to be a silent nothingness? Did she reflect on what could have been? We will all face a day of reckoning, when we will ask ourselves many of the same questions as Kennicott supposed his mother asked. When my mother died last Thanksgiving, I too wondered what her last thoughts were. Was she looking forward to r