There comes a time when every living thing begins to creak and leak. I include among those “living things” this very blog, which I—with considerable help from a few esteemed cohorts—breathed into being a bit more than 12 years ago, with a post on the novelist, essayist, and public intellectual Marilynne Robinson. A couple of years ago, the WordPress platform this blog uses informed me that its “theme,” the graphic design interface it sits on to convey the words and images here, would no longer be technically “supported.” That meant I would have to transition to a new theme, since…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…