Category: Everyday Events
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A Chain Of Events Has No End
The judge cancelled the restraining order setting into motion a chain of events… I walked into my classroom on a September morning to meet my class for the first time. I looked around the room of faces, hands holding pencils, open notebooks and staring eyes. A chain of events was set into motion… One in…
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Don’t Cry For Me, Puerto Rico: My Final Postcard
If you want to use Google Earth to find me, just enter 18.44 N and 66.01 W. That’s me, sitting at the beach bar waiting for an order of nachos. I’ve licked my last stamp and stuck it to the corner of this postcard. I won’t be writing to you anymore–from this place. This is…
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Postcard From The Bottom Of The Green Lagoon
I have only one thing to do and that’s to be the wave that I am and then sink back into the ocean. Sink back into the ocean. Sink back into the ocean. –Fiona Apple. Theme from “The Affair” I know where my body is at the moment. I’m sitting on the sandy floor…
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Dear Grandpa
Dear Grandpa, I thought I’d write to you today. It’s been such a long time since we had a chance to sit and talk about things. I have so many memories of you, I don’t know where to begin. It was so long ago. Remember when I was a little boy? You lived with Grandma…
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The Postman Always Winks Twice
Sometime in the late 1990’s, my wife and I drove to Owego, NY to visit my aging father. My mum had passed away in 1992, so my dad was living quietly and alone as a widower in our big rambling family home on Front Street. Room by room and closet by closet, any objects or…
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The Pink Flamingos of the Pacific Northwest
I asked my daughter, Erin, about her opinion of pink flamingos. “They have their place,” she answered, without taking more than five seconds to think it over. That place was in a front yard, several blocks from her home in Orting, WA. My wife and I were walking back from a brief shopping trip to…
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A Winter Tragedy in the Unforgiving North Country
This is a heartbreaking story of a misjudgment made 87 years ago today. The heart of the sadness is that this is a true event. In the summer of 2014, I was wandering through St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Chateaugay, New York. I was searching for certain headstones to photograph for ancestor-seekers that lived too far…
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The Impossibly Long Life of a Snowflake
It’s a simple act of nature. A billion snowflakes drifting slowly earthward…sometimes rising, sometimes blown sideways…but always downward. If they each made a sound like a bird, someone stepping out onto a frozen porch in the North Country of the Adirondacks would be deafened. But each flake makes a sound only it can hear. It…
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An Ice Queen and Prometheus on a New York City Night
A month ago I wouldn’t be able to stand where I’m standing tonight. Impossible. Unless I was willing to share the same physical space with seven other people. I’m looking down at the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. Four weeks ago, thousands of tourists and locals were cramped in and around the small park that…
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