Category Personal Reflections

A hound bounds through the wet grass as I walk the park across from my house. It cuts sharply left, then right like a fleet NFL running back. Seeming to think momentarily of drawing even with its mistress running maybe 30 yards ahead with leash in hand, it instead brakes suddenly, with great force, and sets to turning in tight circles, one, two, three revolutions or more, a veritable dervish. Then it launches into a vertical jump, at the bottom of which it bursts forth into a mad sprint that overtakes its mistress at last.

Onwards it goes, resuming its diagonal cuts once more as they round the bend and go out of sight through the late November afternoon mist.

This happy spectacle played out as I’d been walking along absorbed in thought about my sister Edie, who died the previous evening, right about the time I was finishing up the newly released PBS documentary on Leonardo da Vinci...

Alright, enough, for the moment, of electoral tempests and distempers. The election and the world will be what they will be, chagrined, stupefied or elated as we ourselves may become in observing and then contending with them, as we must. But we need not do so in every waking moment. (Being at the mercy of our night dreams, of course, is another matter.)

Whatever happens come Tuesday and its aftermath, we must also make time for music and dancing and loving, for joshing and jiving, for romping through woods and along shores, for piling into cars and buses, subways, trains and planes en route to both our appointed and freefloating rounds.

For beholding “the lilies of the field, how they grow.”

The curse and blessing of the formative music from one’s youth (starting at about age 14, according to cognitive scientists) is that it demands squatter rights on the residence it took up in your heart and soul back t...

Call me macabre, but among my favorite traversings are graveyards. My reasons are simple enough: a near-complete absence of vehicle traffic, foot traffic of mostly the solemn and respectful kind, and generally quiet surroundings that invite reduced blood pressure, heightened sensitivity to the natural world and internal contemplation of the inexhaustibly rich subject of finitude.

This means that walking graveyards (and cemeteries—often used interchangeably but with a slight difference, explained below*) is a common activity for Mary and me not only at home, but often on vacation travel as well.

No, graveyards are not quite as much a lure as hiking trails, parks, museums and brewpubs...

My older (by three years) brother will have been gone 14 years this September, felled shortly after he retired at age 62 from a rare, always fatal brain syndrome known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of and miss his presence in my life.

Fortunately, he pops up in my dreams intermittently, always in some strange circumstance (dreams being what they are), but often gratifying nevertheless for the touchpoint they add up to, the real-seeming encounter in which he is alive to me for those moments, moving once again through space and time as a physical presence—until I wake up.

I’ve written here before about the often riotous imaginings of the dream world, the caution against trying too hard to drag them into our current waking life via some great literal “meaning” we can apply to become better, happier persons, all the wiser for our visitations from the Great B...

The house adjacent to our back fence was a stately old matron, the very first in our entire neighborhood, or so we have heard. I used to admire it from the street on my walks when we lived several blocks away, its deep frontage sporting the year-round, unirrigated green lawn common to this part of the world, with its more or less 12-month rains that seemed another world altogether for this California-reared boy, used to that state’s annual May through September drought cycle.

The home played host to a family for the first couple of years after my arrival, three tow-headed children chasing after their dad and the soccer ball he used to fake keeping away from them as they all flailed and flopped about the yard.

One of those terminally creaky patio swings suitable for young (or old) lovers or multiple small children was off to the side, and just under the porch awning, a rocking chair.

Also off to the side an...