My father isn’t Superman. He doesn’t wear shiny Spandex and a cape, he can’t fly. If he could, he would be out of there. Out of there immediately, flying up and out into the clean air. The nursing home where my father lives is now crawling with Covid-19. Thirty-eight cases and counting, ten of those […]
Miscellaneous
Wallace Stegner wrote, “Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.” That’s if you’re astronomically lucky. Most of us turn to dust or ash, and the bones we leave are eaten by roots. Few get to be fossils. If you’re interested […]
A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta as a beet. Natural inks have been enjoying […]
It’s a cliché in art to have a sudden burst of inspiration. I was just looking at the bird, and boom, the poem just…came to me! Or, I was scuba-diving off the coast of Fiji and I couldn’t believe it — the song just wrote itself! I think of that quote from Anne Lamott’s Bird […]
Can I just tell you about something funny that happened/is happening? I’ve been working at a university, and one of the most appealing perks—given I’m not anywhere in the world of tenure or sabbaticals—is the free tuition on any course in the whole place. I could get an MBA…for free! I could become some crazy […]
Many years ago, when I was working as a river guide, a little boy accidentally knocked a girl’s front teeth out with his paddle. The girl was in pain, and understandably distraught about losing her permanent teeth, which had only just grown in. But there were still several miles of river left, and we needed her to calm down and get back in the […]
People who have come to visit say that it is quiet here. Now it is even quieter. Fewer car drive by, fewer planes fly overhead. In the hour before dawn I no longer hear the train whistle. My neighbor used to leave early each morning for dental school, 50 miles away. Now there is no […]
Spleen, I’m so sorry I let you go. It was some years ago, now, and I was in surgery for a thing that looked like pancreatic cancer, but, thankfully, wasn’t. You may recall what happened, that I had a truly unusual autoimmune response in a neighboring organ–a sort of fishnet tissue growth took over the […]
