patrickjegan

November 16, 2016

Here I Sit In Space #275 In The Rose Reading Room: Yet I Am Not Insecure

It was an afternoon in mid-October. The rain had fallen most of the morning so when I arrived at the wet slippery steps of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on 5th Ave., the scattered metal tables were mostly empty and wet. I posted a photo of the wet tables on Instagram.…

November 5, 2016

My Personal War With The Xlerator

[Photo credit: Patrick Egan] There ought to be a law… What I am about to say might be familiar to some of my readers. These thoughts and descriptions appeared, in a slightly different form, in my book In The Middle of Somewhere. It was in the chapter that dealt with public bathrooms on a cross-country…

October 31, 2016

The Blind Date

[Source: Google search.] My wife and I arrived at a popular Upper West Side restaurant about fifteen minutes before our friends. Mariam remained by the door to wait. The place was crowded and noisy. We’d been here before. It was always like that. I made straight for the bar to get a beer and wait…

October 12, 2016

Thirty Feet From My Pillow: A Tale Of Love, Sex And Perhaps Death Outside My Bedroom Window

I can’t recall seeing so many clusters and varieties of Fungi in my front yard in the sixteen years we have owned our home on the hill above Rainbow Lake. I was on my knees examining a species that was unfamiliar to me. I was on my knees in three inches of yellow, red and…

October 9, 2016

The Great And Silent Feast

I felt the breeze… I stumbled on a tree root when… Finally, we reached the pond… Concentrate. Start over. When I was a teacher I was often given the dubious privilege of “lunch duty”. A room, nearly the size of a gym, filled with 5th & 6th graders…or 9th & 10th graders and a hand…

September 25, 2016

Kids Bottles: Another Moral Dilemma

As I grow older, it seems to me, I am faced with some kind of moral choice nearly every day. Then, I suppose that it’s something that’s true for every thinking person. Should I watch Game of Thrones or search for the Vatican Channel on my Roku? Should I continue to espouse the obvious truths…

September 10, 2016

Allison, Me And The Ghosts Of Judy Garland

“Who could ask for anything more?” –Ira Gershwin Ok, so I pulled a few strings. Actually, it was only one string. The daughter of my wife’s boss (Dr. Chris Walsh from Mount Sinai Hospital), was playing the lead in the hit Broadway show, An American…

September 2, 2016

The Masts…Oh, the Masts

Here I am once again. I’m sitting with friends at the Naked Turtle for dinner. It’s located on the shore of Lake Champlain in Plattsburgh. I listen to the conversation but I’m drawn to the eastern view, toward Vermont. The marina is filled with boats of all sorts…but it’s the sailboats that attract me. Where…

July 28, 2016

To All My Blog Followers And Friends

I just want you to know that I appreciate the “likes” and the “follows” that have made my blogging experience exciting and fulfilling. But, I’m going to take a hiatus from “pumping out the posts” for a few months. You deserve to know why. -I’m still exhausted from the 50 or so posts I published…

June 21, 2016

Two Trees

A man and woman have four children–two boys and two girls. The same seed…the same egg. One boy grows up, attends college and eventually becomes a doctor and later joins Doctors Without Borders. His brother sits in a small cell at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, NY. He did something unspeakable to an eleven…