Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
DECEMBER 4, 2024 – Last night before bedtime—our granddaughter’s, not mine—I read from Stave I of A Christmas Carol. Few if any works of literature composed in English have enjoyed such broad and lasting popularity as C.D.’s book of the season. Compact—especially for Dickens—and impactful, it’s a tale that I appreciate ever more as I …
DECEMBER 1, 2024 – Today we hiked across Central Park to the Met, where we wandered slowly through the special exhibition, Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350, featuring works of the very early Renaissance, Sienese artists Duccio (ca. 1250/60 – ca. 1318/19) (in the main), and Simone Martini, and brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. After …
NOVEMBER 28, 2024 – I remember when 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick, first hit the theaters. At the time I was a freshman at Sterling School, a small boarding school in Craftsbury Common, a hilltop hamlet tucked away in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. There was no theater in our little village, …
NOVEMBER 25, 2024 – Reactions vary among the roughly 73 million voters who voted for Kamala Harris. Some people are scandalized and looking into permanent residency, even full citizenship requirements, in Canada, Costa Rica, Ireland or Portugal. Others are in the ring with a bunch of fellow angry Democrats accusing the Harris campaign and party …
NOVEMBER 22, 2024 – For me the day was a mad scramble on multiple fronts. Ironically, all was unexpectedly quiet on the most critical front—our oldest son’s health. His PET scan had been scheduled for 12:45, and we’d managed to arrive at the clinic with minutes to spare. After completing the requisite forms, he was …
NOVEMBER 19, 2024 – Today, finally, I understood the people who voted for Trump. At least the faction who “couldn’t take it anymore” and voted to burn the place down. Except . . . in my case my wanting to trash the system wasn’t over the price of a gallon of milk or a carton …
NOVEMER 12, 2024 – Life for me has been a huge connect-the-dots project. I’m not sure what the final figure will be once all the dots are connected, but if I were to guess—which I’m about to do—I’d say the final figure will be full of flashbacks, intersections, coincidences, circular side-trips and the inevitable open-ended …
NOVEMBER 9, 2024 – At the personal, conscious level, our mere existence is a really big deal. In fact, it’s bigger than that. It’s everything. From an individual’s point of view, what could matter more than the individual’s existence? Okay, fine. I overstate things a bit or rather, a lot. What matters more than one’s …
NOVEMBER 8, 2024 – However much my heart, psyche and soul are restored and rejuvenated by the woods of Björnholm along the shore of a secluded lake, I also thrive in the society of my species, homo sapiens—beings every bit as noble as we are ignoble. Today I interacted only with the most noble, though …
NOVEMBER 7, 2024 – “What in the world happened to the Republican Party?” Democrats had been asking ever since Trump assumed unquestioned and unquestionable control of it. In the run-up to the 2024 election, pundits predicted that if Trump lost, the party would lie in ruins. After Trump’s decisive defeat of Harris on Tuesday, however, …
NOVEMBER 6, 2024 – Early this morning before the rest of the household was up, I quietly went downstairs, fixed myself my usual breakfast, then slipped out of the house and out of town. The election results had taken their emotional toll on us all, and for the sake of everyone’s blood pressure, I wanted …
OCTOBER 25, 2024 – When driving to the Red Cabin and reaching the point some 40 miles from my destination, I typically tune the radio to WOJB 88.9 FM, the public radio station broadcasting from the heart of the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation. It’s a quirky little public radio station featuring an eclectic range of …
OCTOBER 19, 2024 – Yesterday I celebrated the complete take-out of lake cabin Dock No. 1. Today I failed in my attempt to de-install Dock No. 2. But it was not a total loss. First, I didn’t break any limbs—or worse—nor did I lose or damage any tools, accessories or the dock itself. Second, I …
OCTOBER 16, 2024 – This morning I completed the second of two remote, hours-long sessions with a researcher at the University of Minnesota. Our family had been recruited some 25 years ago to participate in the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (“SIBS”) of adoptive and non-adoptive families undertaken by the Minnesota Center for Twin and …
OCTOBER 15, 2024 – “Dear Diary, In many ways today brought a typical mixture of ebb and flow; tension and resolution; yin and yan. What was different about it all was my awareness, my perception of opposing forces coming together to provide a modicum of peace through balance. I started off in conflict—talking litigation strategy …
OCTOBER 12, 2024 – Today our granddaughter celebrated her ninth birthday. At our son’s request my wife and I “got scarce” for nearly the entire duration of the shindig, which was staged at our house. At first we were a bit miffed at being excluded, but as I observed the birthday girl’s mother and dad …
OCTOBER 10, 2024 – If I’m anything like the next person, there’s reason to worry about the next person. All my life I’ve continually tried to step outside myself, my quirks and confines, thoughts and ideas, idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, mostly to turn back and see how I come across to myself. This is a challenging …
OCTOBER 6, 2024 – Maybe it’s an “age thing” or perhaps its my surroundings or both; in any case, today I found myself in orbit around my own little world, as it were, and the view triggered myriad emotional and cognitive responses in a combination I had not experienced before. Physically speaking, I was well …
OCTOBER 4, 2024 – Lord knows there’s lots to think and talk about these days: campaign shenanigans; suffering—and conspiracy theories (will they never end?) associated with disaster recovery in the wake of Helene; mass war criminality in Sudan; Antarctica turning green from global warming; the staggering blow to the economy if we were to round …
SEPTEMBER 21, 2024 – After breakfast on the porch I ventured out to the dock to survey the unsettled weather. The wind was picking up from the southeast, and dark clouds lined the horizon. It wouldn’t take long for a clearer picture to form. By 10 o’clock the wind was roaring at 20 miles an …
SEPTEMBER 16, 2024 – Today on my walk I ran into . . . er, encountered . . . an acquaintance of mine, a retired engineer, whom I hadn’t seen since early this summer. He and his wife own a nice home with a grand view of the park, and he was out tending a …
SEPTEMBER 15, 2024 – Aging seems to increase my amazement. Late one evening recently we sat with friends out on the dock for conversation and a bit of star-gazing. The first quarter moon had already set, leaving the Milky Way and constellations in full command of the celestial stage. I’d brought out two sets of …
SEPTEMBER 6, 2024 – Earlier this summer I constructed two wooden ramps to provide passage over two side-by-side fallen giants of the woods, each . . . two feet in diameter. The completed project looked simple enough, but in design and construction the operation required a fair among of engineering. As with most completed cabin …
SEPTEMBER 5, 2024 – (Cont.) When Susan and her husband Bob pulled into the yard, I had no idea what to expect. She was such a young kid when we’d last met on the deck of her family’s swimming pool in New Jersey, she’d made no lasting impression. We’d had no contact since. Jenny, who’d …
SEPTEMBER 4, 2024 – (Cont,) Many families experience splits, rifts, friction, upheavals, estrangement. The fractures in our own—cousin vs. cousin (Carol’s father vs. my uncle) and, it seemed, brother vs. brother (Carol’s grandfather vs. mine)—were not unusual as families go. Only a specialisit in abnormal psychology, however, could categorize the discord that ebbed and flowed …