Yearly Archives 2013

Our politics seem so poisoned today one is tempted to retreat to a soundproof room and either scream till the voice is no more or crank up the volume on some punk rock anthem until the hearing goes. We live in an era when every garden-variety disagreement begets threats of filibuster and terminal gridlock, and we are left longing for a more innocent and collegial time.

Like…1968, maybe?

No, that probably wouldn’t work. Two assassinations, two months apart, of towering figures in the civil rights movement coupled with an unpopular war to lend an unreal air to domestic politics that year. And that was before the rioting at the Democratic Convention in Chicago later in the summer that gave Richard Nixon the boost he needed to win in November and usher in the dismal history that followed.

Yet within the profound conflict of that era stirred powerful longings and currents for the continual change that has a...

We were sitting in a private room in the ER, X-rays done, waiting for the doctor to arrive to show us the pictures and prescribe a course of action. That’s when my 14-year-old daughter had what was her first, I think, enlightenment moment, fully grasping, in a personal and urgent way, the strange tragic happenstances that can alter life in a blink. Thankfully, the in-breaking bit of wisdom didn’t cost her very much by way of bodily injury.

“It’s so weird,” she said, a shallow laugh coming into her voice somewhere near the top of her throat. “This morning I woke up and went to school and everything was all usual, and now I’m in ER with a broken finger.”

She’d been playing first base for her high school’s JV softball team when she reached to dig a throw out of the dirt and the ball struck her non-gloved hand in just the right freakish way to dislocate the joint at her knuckle and cause a small br...

Words, so many words. Sometimes, it is helpful to have fewer of them—and set to music.

And sometimes, the intimacy of a solo singer songwriter, writing and singing soul to soul, is the perfect antidote to the vastness and almost inevitable abstractions of Big Questions and Conundrums. And few singers do “intimate” like Jesse Winchester does. It requires a peculiar kind of genius to lay one’s soul quite this bare while working to harvest the artistic and creative chops that coalesce into such timeless art.

I needed something from the likes of Jesse Winchester after the week we’ve had in these United States. Maybe you did, too.

I’d thought all week of doing a follow-up to the post on the Boston Marathon bombing, so many troublesome, ponderous questions did it raise...

No matter the event, whether tragedy or triumph, we look for connections. “I was born and grew up there!”

“My sister lives around the corner!”

“I did a summer internship in that building!”

“My nephew was his college roommate!”

Most grievously, when the connection has been foisted on us by life’s merciless and random roulette wheel: “That was my 8-year-old son who died in the blast.”

My own connection to the Boston Marathon is manifold. Exactly 20 years ago, I had approached that same finishing line where the explosions happened, exultant, like everyone, after finally living every runner’s dream: I had run Boston. It would be my final marathon, a grand occasion that had drawn me out of “retirement,” and for which I endured many months of difficult training and injury setbacks, none of which mattered as I floated down Boylston Street into the finisher’s chute.

I’ve also been in ...

If I were inclined to believe in God as a helpful, sky-residing fellow lording it over us all from his perch in the heavens, I would present him with three words of challenge by which he might explain himself and his creation: fleas, mosquitos, and the (damn) weeds that repopulate my poppy patch with unremitting, increasing fecundity every year. Of the three, this last one is the matter that most occupies my thoughts every April, as spring and its weeds kick into high gear.

Let me be clear: I bow deeply to the wonder of the earth’s regeneration. The exultation, reverence and passions unleashed by spring? Count me among their staunchest friends. (If spring were on Facebook, I’d be posting like mad on its wall this time of year.)

But weeds? And the back-aching, muscle-tensing work required to clear them in order for another of God’s masterpieces—the perfectly developed California poppy—to pop unbidden th...