Category: Real Personal History
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68 Steps Along The Nave Of Wells Cathedral
Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, I was climbing the endless steps of Sacre Coeur in Paris. My wife was at my side. We paused on the 67th step, and, in the warm Parisian sun, we turned and looked back at the City of Lights. We kissed on that 67th step. It was my 67th…
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Yes, But Why Can’t You Go Home Again?
It’s a cliché. It’s a meme. It’s been repeated a hundred billion times by three hundred billion people. “You can’t go home again” I’ve read Thomas Wolfe’s book by the same name. It was a long time ago. I may be wrong (correct me if I am), but I do not recall Wolfe ever saying…
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Dance Like A Wave Of The Sea
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree… –W. B. Yeats Three decades have passed since I last walked the streets of Dublin, Galway and Sligo. A great many things have changed in those years. And, a great many haven’t. The smell of peat-fires in Dublin on a December night, the blasts of…
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Digging A Grave On A Beautiful Spring Afternoon
I stood in the soft loam, nine inches below ground level, leaned against my shovel, and thought about death and insects. This is not a difficult thing to do when you’re helping to dig a grave on a day in May when the gnats and flies are biting ankles and arms. After all, it is…
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Playing Scrabble On Facebook With Your Daughter: The Agony And The Ecstasy
There is on odious, evil and insistent karma that floats and follows me everywhere. Like gnats on a hot afternoon in the Adirondacks, they follow me about in my own yard to plague my very soul. Gnats (or is it the equally noxious black flies?) that have been known to drive a tundra dwelling musk ox…
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The Preference For Fog On The Downtown Bus
The M1 bus stop where I was standing was on 5th Avenue and 98th Street. It’s across the avenue from Mount Sinai Hospital. It wasn’t raining…it was a downpour. My flimsy $5.99 umbrella protected my head and shoulders but little else. The front half of each shoe was soaked. My outside flap of the shoulder…
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From My Cradle To Her Grave
The first woman to see me naked is lying six feet down in the silt of the Susquehanna River. It’s a small cemetery in a small community…not even a town or village…just a cluster of houses several miles down river from the town where I grew up. On the last day of May, I will…
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