New to town, wanting to establish a connection with a medical professional should need arise, I checked in for my first visit to a clinic here in the Hudson River Valley of New York. As the receptionist was examining my insurance card from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, my home turf for the better
This is my contribution to our collective turn of mind and heart as we note 9/11 twenty-one years later. A sliver of ficton from a novel of mine.
The New Yorker’s latest edition (August 29, 2022) published profiles they’d first published long ago, including one by the late Nat Hentoff from 1964 of Bob Dylan, 23 at the time, and already recognized as a new, incisive voice. Among the things Hentoff illuminated is that Dylan ran away from home seven times––at ten, at
My favorite novel, The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, was published in 1961, the year I graduated high school next-to-last in my class, ten years before taking up residence in Mr. Juster’s occasional hometown, Amherst, Massachusetts, as the oldest freshman Amherst College had ever admitted. Last I heard, The Phantom Tollbooth has sold around five
This photo is of where, three years ago today, Dear, my beloved, ended her physical presence in the incarnation we shared for 45 years. A fuller story, should you wish one, can be revealed through a few of my essays from that time. This one is solely about my sense of things today, what
When we arrived in Santa Fe from Vermont last July and walked into our newly leased home, the heavens celebrated with a hail shower that completely whitened the ground. It was the first and last such shower during the eleven months New Mexico was our home together. (Lissa already a thirty-year New Mexican; I the
When I die, if the gods approve, everyone in my address book will receive this note:
Seventy years ago, E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), also known as e.e. Cummings (in the style of some of his poems), an American artist of diverse genres, was invited by his alma mater, Harvard, to deliver the 1952-53 school year Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, a series of six presentations. In the first lecture, Cummings speaks of his