“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’m trying to take a breath. I’m trying to snatch some semblance of calm from the ten thousand stories that tell of the imminent end of so much that sane human beings love. I cannot bring myself to write the list because I would feel compelled to leave nothing out and that would strangle this moment. We left a bare 50-foot maple in our yard. It died about 18 months […]
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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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