Recent Blog Posts
Lietuva 3: The Crossroads of Lithuania
It’s gonna be a hot time in Kaunas this weekend. Two days of fun commence Saturday and on Friday workers were constructing stages and setting up sound systems from Kaunas Castle to the Botanical Garden and even on the banks of the Nemunas River. By late afternoon when we arrived at the Garden, a dozen…
Lietuva 2: Fun with ATMs
Before we travel, of course, we contact credit-card companies and our bank lest they get perturbed at withdrawals and expenditures in far-flung places. At least we do that now ever since Bank of America slapped a freeze on my money when I tried to make a withdrawal at the Milan airport a few years back….
Lietuva 1: Finding Our Feet
Note to self: pay attention when walking, especially when on steps and curbstones. At the main post office in Kaunas, the last step ends with an extra bump, an inch-and-a-half drop to the paving stones. Didn’t see it. Fell on my face. Thank heavens the camera is okay. My left ankle supports my weight but…
The New York Times and the Ethics of Eating Meat
The New York Times sponsored a contest: “Defending your Dinner: An Open Contest for Hungry Ethicists.” I’m a sucker for contests, raffles and such, even though I never win. This effort met with predictable results. Because I was curious about when the “winners” might have their essays printed, I poked around on the Internet. Much…
Patience, My Dogwood
Our dogwood has finally bloomed. She withstood the travails of flood, drought and blizzard, and constant cropping by deer, and this spring she blossomed, like some insecure girl crossing that seemingly impassable divide between challenged childhood and blessed womanhood. Her siblings, in a foster-child kind of way, were more precocious. I knew, however, that delayed…
Making a Green Velvet Carpet of Moss
When we signed on the dotted line and acquired the key to our new home in 2005—a new house in a new development—the rock-studded clay and steep slopes of our lot offered a tabula rasa. The woods beyond, a non-tidal wetland protected by the state Department of Natural Resources, would ring with birdsong as soon…
Procreation, Politics and Power or What I Learned in High School that I Need to Know in this Election Year
A few years back I found myself on camera with Regis Philbin on the quiz show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” A few days prior to that encounter, a factoid learned when I was sixteen drifted into my brain during a trivia-cramming-induced stupor. The information that floated back concerned the 19th century Englishman Thomas…
The Remains of the Deer
There is nothing that speaks to the collision of Suburbia and Nature like an encounter with the skeletal remains of deer inside the city limits. March came in like a lamb and the soft air lures us out to wander through patches of sunshine by creek and through woods and fields. Sometimes we find beautiful…
What We Read
We—my Dear One and I—attended the 121st Turnbull Lecture at Johns Hopkins University on the evening of February 28. The speaker, John Irwin, a senior faculty member in the Writing Seminars, has just published a book on the poetry of Hart Crane and his topic was “Building the Virgin: The Triple Female Archetype in Hart…
Retrospection 1: My Madeleines
Memories are not, I think, narratives we remember as much as impressions, images and sensations. In that I am in agreement with Proust. Such imprints seem, at least to me at this great distance from the events, a little arbitrary although not like events seen through a rose-tinted lens. Who knows, though, whether they are…
It’s a Lovely Day to be a Little Groundhog
My parents apparently intended to name me “Maggie,” but settled on “John” when they became convinced I would be a boy; my mother, in a postnatal stupor, responded to a badgering nurse that my name was “Ellen” and that’s what stuck. They still like the name Maggie, though, and went out and bought a toy…
At 60 you’re just getting started?
The morning of January 28 dawned bright and mild. At 11:00, doors would open to the party we had planned for ourselves to celebrate my 60th, my Dear One’s 78th, the 2nd anniversary of our marriage and my Tattooed Boy’s 30th, and all of which fall with a month’s span, give or take a couple…
Private Faith and Public Actions
Well the Forty-Niners beat the Saints in a heart-stopping final two minutes of the playoffs, and the Patriots beat the Broncos and their verbified quarterback, Tim Tebow. Does this mean that those who pan for gold have an advantage over they who have hearts of gold? That success comes to those who place constitutional values…
Black Beauty goes to World War One
Apparently a few British critics have made the connection between Anna Sewell’s classic, Black Beauty (1877), and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, the basis for Stephen Spielberg’s most recent film, but no American reviewer I have encountered has thought to compare them. Perhaps in this country the relationship is not so obvious but Black Beauty belongs…
Happy Birthday to Me!
January 5th is the best day to have a birthday and there seemed to be no shortage of warm wishes from the cosmos. 2012 is, I hope, an auspicious moment to enter, along with the Today Show, a seventh decade. My Dear One devised the perfect plan: leave the car in Wilmington and take the…
