December 10th, 2019 | General, Politics, Society at Large
The headline for the article by Peter Baker in The New York Times (December 10, 2019) caught my eye: “In a Swelling Age of Tribalism, the Trust of a Country Teeters.” I started reading and came to this: Most Americans tell pollsters that they do not believe what he...
December 6th, 2019 | Architecture and Design, Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Europe, Family, Genealogy, General, Health, literature and poetry, Travel, visual arts
My Dear One, noticing that we had a lot of empty calendar space from the end of October to the beginning of November, suggested that we fly off to somewhere in Europe. France? Italy? It took almost no time to decide on the Veneto. For ten days we nested in the...
December 3rd, 2019 | Architecture and Design, Europe, General, Travel, visual arts
I had long wanted to fully experience the Venice Biennale. In 2017, the curator of the American pavilion was Christopher Bedford, also the newly hired director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. The credentials created quite the synergistic buzz. The artist who...
November 21st, 2019 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Europe, General, Travel
I travel to eat. My Dear One not so much, although he takes pleasure when we hit the culinary jackpot. Eating is not just about finding those restaurants you want to keep secret from Tripadvisor and Yelp. It’s about the idea of food, the way local ingredients might be...
November 19th, 2019 | Architecture and Design, Europe, General, Travel
Andrea Palladio published I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), an inventory of his buildings, in 1570. Palladio largely invented the concept of the country home, conjoining the physical space of artifice with the metaphysical space...
November 15th, 2019 | Europe, General, Travel
In 1368, at the age of sixty-four, the poet and philosopher Petrarch settled into a home in the bucolic village of Arcuà in the Euganean Hills, just southwest of Padua. His daughter and her family joined him there; she ran the household while Petrarch studied, wrote...
October 18th, 2019 | General, transportation, Travel, United States
I have learned that I need to open up my Surface Pro tablet, my travel device, several days ahead of time and make sure everything is working. Specifically, I must check that Microsoft OneDrive is working properly. Once home, I booted the thing up and tried again....
October 14th, 2019 | General, the world and Mother Nature
Last year and the year before, mostly in the colder months when leaves litter the ground, a red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) frequently lounged in a tree a little to the southeast of our house. Not all the time, but just at the moment daylight arrives. The tree,...
September 19th, 2019 | Family, Genealogy, General, Indigenous Peoples
As the Reverend’s 80th birthday was coming up, her sister Belle called and asked a favor: would I be willing to print off a copy of the family genealogy for a gift? Like the one she had received from her kids on one of her own big birthdays? Reverend and Belle are the...
August 12th, 2019 | General, Politics, Popular Culture
We were preparing supper, I think, when my Dear One said, a propos of nothing, “You know what the problem is with Trump?” “No,” I answered, “What is the problem with Trump?” I held back the thought that essentially nothing is right with Trump. “He thinks he’s a...
