• Music - Personal Reflections

    The Bittersweet Nostalgia of Aging Artists and the Songs They Sung Into You

    November 2, 2024 - By 

    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…

  • Personal Reflections

    The Peace of Graveyards…and the Tales They Tell

    August 11, 2024 - By 

    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…

  • Personal Reflections - Religion

    A Dream of My Brother
    From the Great Beyond

    May 19, 2024 - By 

    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…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    The NIMBYism of Neighborhood Life

    April 21, 2024 - By 

    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…

  • Film/TV - Personal Reflections

    Why I Quit Watching “The Sopranos”

    January 27, 2024 - By 

    When my daughter was four or five years old, we took her to a highly touted “children’s movie” animation having to do with the escapades of a pony finding its way through fraught circumstances. I remember neither the title nor anything else to do with the plot save this: at one point, the pony was tied to a stake and thrashing helplessly as foreboding music swelled and some evil force prepared to descend upon it. The movie ended for us right then because my daughter began to sob uncontrollably, fear and sorrow etched full upon her face. After a few…