March 5th, 2012 | General, Society at Large, the world and Mother Nature
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...
March 1st, 2012 | Education, Memory, Women
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...
February 19th, 2012 | Genealogy, Memory, Pets, Time Passes
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...
February 3rd, 2012 | Pets
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...
February 2nd, 2012 | Friends, Health, Memory, Popular Culture, Time Passes, Women
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...
January 18th, 2012 | General, Politics, Popular Culture
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?...
January 12th, 2012 | Memory, Popular Culture
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....
January 9th, 2012 | Popular Culture, Time Passes, United States, visual arts, Women
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...
January 4th, 2012 | General, Holidays, the world and Mother Nature, Time Passes
A mild January day is a gift any time but on New Year’s Day it seems a good omen. Most every January 1 my Dear One and I go walking, partly to allow the miasma of rich meals, welcomes prepared, and emotions charged to dissipate, mostly to regain the sense of us that...
December 20th, 2011 | Genealogy, General, Holidays
What will happen to all those Christmas ornaments when I am gone? The tree is finally decorated. We bought it five or six days ago and it has been sitting in a bucket of water awaiting installation in the living room. Then yesterday we set it into the stand, draped it...
