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Diagnosis: Opus Nauseous
After two months of struggle, the deed is done. The Little Essay That Could finally started its engines, cut loose the cars carrying the freight of an idea that didn’t belong, and chugged its way...
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Cuba Solidarity Day – A Larger Context
On October 23, 1956, I celebrated my tenth birthday. Surely there was cake and ice cream, a gift or two, and a party with balloons and games, but I really can’t say. My most vivid memory of the...
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Back to the Scrap Heap
I love researching the pedigree of blog awards. It’s a grown-up, vntary version of the forced march our 6th grade Catechism class made through the book of Genesis. Just as following those Biblical...
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Cruising Yoknapatawpha
Step aboard a boat docked in any of the marinas clustered around Clear Lake, loose the lines, find the channel, and soon enough you’ll be edging into Galveston Bay. Whether the Bay’s your destination...
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Persistence, Personified
After months of struggle, The Little Essay That Could finally started its engines, cut loose the string of cars that had been carrying the freight of an idea that didn’t belong and began chugging its...
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Angels Passing
Arrayed across the page, the words evoke memories, pluck at threads of emotion as though determined to unravel their mystery. If you do not believe in the ginn, you have only to look at the heavens for...
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The Catastrophe of Success
Uncle Henry’s was a fine place to celebrate a first year of writing. Tucked between Yazoo Pass and the Mississippi River, just north of Clarksdale and a little south of the Helena bridge, it sat...
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The Threshold of Imagination
Given an opportunity to read Graham Greene on the veranda of the City Hotel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I found it impossible to resist. What better place to take up a battered, second-hand copy of The...
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Tree Houses, Books, and the Joys of Reflection
To my parents’ chagrin, I was a climber. Long before I walked across a room, I was climbing stairs. I clambered over picket fences as easily as those woven from wire. After I scaled Mt. Refrigerator,...
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On the Road to Ithaka
Presidio La Bahia, Goliad, Texas Any woman who calls the weeks before Christmas the Interminable Season of Holy Obligation either is joking, or has a surfeit of sugarplums dancing in her head. When one...
View ArticleOn Taking Goethe’s Advice
Woman Reading by Candlelight ~ Peter Ilsted, 1908 Burned onto flimsy wooden signs in souvenir shops, quoted to death on Facebook, memed on Instagram, and included in semi-inspirational books of every...
View ArticleLaundry Days
My maternal grandmother, c.1920 Every era defines its necessities differently. For my grandmother, a clothesline was as much a necessity as her twin aluminum wash tubs and the assortment of scrub...
View ArticleBlessed Be
I am in a mind to bless. Blessed be the book, the page, the word, the letter. Blessed be the great names and the ungreat names. Blessed be the velvet that is the color of wine, and the wine. Blessed...
View ArticleThe Poets’ Birds: Dabblers
Whether Kenneth Grahame meant The Wind in the Willows to be for children or adults has been debated, but the timeless tale of animal friends and their adventures along the Thames, in the Wild Wood, or...
View ArticleThe Poets’ Birds ~ Chaucer Imagines a Parliament
The Parliment of Birds ~ Carl Wilhelm de Hamilton (1668-1754) Valentine’s Day as a romantic holiday has somewhat less to do with the Christian saint named Valentine than with Geoffrey Chaucer, whose...
View ArticleCapturing Christmas
Of all the gifts I enjoyed each Christmas, new books were among the best. Over the years, they changed: childhood’s Little Golden Books turning into The Bobbsey Twins, and then into Cherry Ames. In...
View ArticleThe Threshold of Imagination
The old City Hotel ~ Freetown, Sierra Leone Reading Graham Greene on the veranda of Freetown’s City Hotel was an opportunity not to be missed. What better place to take up a battered, second-hand copy...
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