“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
I remember an America before it went nuts. This is not an old white man’s nostalgia for a ‘blah blah sonny when I was a boy in simpler times’ semi-dementia warbling. That America was a mess and lots of the signs were flashing red about the culture wars, guns, environmental destruction, our love of mindless spectacle and our eroding ability to focus on complexity, but pre-Columbine, pre-9/11, pre-Iraq War, and […]
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Each Saturday the little boy and his father come in for hot chocolate and a cookie. We speak to each other through drawings. “What shall we talk about today?” I write. He thinks, holds the pen up to his mouth, lips pursed. “Mountains,” he prints. What makes mountains?” I ask. It takes me a moment. I’m deciphering the word he scrawled. “Love?” No. “Lava.” His father laughs and says, “I think […]
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Alma Vogels had superb eyes. She could id birds by subtle marks in plumage when we could not see the bird. She painted too and produced hundreds of works. Patti, my wife and her daughter, thought she spent 10 or 15 minutes on each of these pictures. That’s all. They were an exercise for her. In Tuscany, Alma sat and looked out and up and her brushstrokes delivered all of […]
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Half a pace ahead, one shoulder hunched, she seems to be wheezing, but she is leading him out the heavy door, his arm looped with hers, a big blind man in sunglasses, gray-bearded, scruffy in a Viking t. In the parking lot, he stops. An SUV is inching towards them. They have come out from the shade into bright sunlight. He tilts his head toward where he feels the sun […]
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