June 28th, 2014 | Gardens and Gardening, Genealogy, General, Memory, Time Passes, Travel, visual arts
This was the branch that most frightened me, the one most perfectly positioned to do irreparable harm to the monument. Lower and smaller branches had already been removed, opening space around the slender column surmounted by its neoclassical urn. Four of us—two on...
June 24th, 2014 | Genealogy, Health, Memory, Time Passes, Travel
When last I saw him, the blue and lavender and green plaid cotton shirt Jerry was wearing made his bleached-denim eyes bright. The reason to travel to Damariscotta, Maine, was to have more time with Jerry before he loses his way in Time, to have dinner with Doffy and...
January 29th, 2014 | Education, Friends, Genealogy, General, Health, Memory, visual arts
Matthew Adelberg turned twenty-one a few days past; when I look at the artist who once was a student in my art history classroom, I see something closer to the boy at his bar mitzvah. This exhibition at the Dadian Gallery at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington...
January 21st, 2014 | Gardens and Gardening, Genealogy, General, Health, the world and Mother Nature, Travel
“The engine drives the boat through the water,” Peter Warwick, the naval specialist on the cruise said. “With the sails up, she moves with the water.” The feeling, the difference, was evident even to a landlubber like me. Last night as we sailed toward St. Barts, a...
January 20th, 2014 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Genealogy, General, Memory, Time Passes, Travel
We passengers walk across decks and down hallways as though lost in the embrace of drink. The swells of the Caribbean as we traveled from Antigua to St. Barthélemy shift me from side to side, back to front, a spherical motion that I haven’t quite mastered yet. This is...
December 12th, 2012 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Friends, Genealogy, General, Holidays, Memory, Time Passes, Travel
In the waning months of my “Year of Present Living” we finally got to Lithuania. Both of us acquired a whole bunch of new cousins in 2012, as well. That’s what happens when you shake those family trees with vigor and a little manic enthusiasm. Our dinner table,...