The petal business started years ago, when I was shaking off the petals of an over-blown peony and some little kid ran under them and got petals all over and reacted like Christmas morning, surprise and crazy joy. Kids seem to love showers of petals. The current batch of neighborhood kids also likes just the […]
I was pretty sure the sky was flat, like a cap or a lid or a ceiling. I didn’t think about the sun going up, around, and down; or the moon changing shape; or the constellations moving to different neighborhoods. I was curious about other things, not the sky. The first time I thought about […]
Uncertainty is and always has been, for everyone, one of life’s non-negotiable facts. These days, what with politics and pandemics, uncertainty is also the whole country’s mood, a fog bank of unhappiness and anxiety that’s settled in everywhere and isn’t leaving any time soon. Everybody’s irritable and pissed-off and scared, and they’re taking it out […]
This was first published December 8, 2016 and since then I have stopped doing yoga — not stopped needing to, just stopped doing it, the result of the pandemic and massive personal character flaws. The need for bullshit detection, however, will never stop, never. I did not want to join yoga class. I hated those […]
Update: the Nobel Prize for physics for 2020 went to the scientist for whose profile I created the Finkbeiner Test; and the prize for chemistry went to the two scientists who helped create CRISPR; and to the amazement of headline writers everywhere, all three were women. I had to get all over Twitter, grading these […]
Here’s one of the odd things about this pandemic but it’ll take me a minute to explain it. The older you get, the more people you know who have died. You know what “died” means: their physical bodies have stopped, we’re left with whatever of their presences we can hold on to. Whatever else the […]
I wrote this October 1, 2018. I was thinking about getting older and how that meant getting stronger or more concentrated or something; and of course life imitating art as it does, this particular coffee shop morning conversation happened at the same time. I was also thinking about the Kavanaugh hearings and the extraordinary anger […]
This first ran May 17, 2017, and Chris still finding stuff. He’s also gone on to serious work at the local historical society. His retirement looks to be going splendidly. So do his pandemic plans, as all he needs is a stockpile of postcards, the internet, and the ability to merge the lost past into […]