Four years ago I stopped mowing a section of lawn behind my house. It was a couple of hundred square feet we no longer needed for soccer, baseball, and football from when the kids were young. I no longer built backyard ice rinks. What was the point of having all that lawn? I allowed the patch to return to nature’s whim. During the first summer the grass grew uniformly tall and a breeze...
On a secluded mountain lake, a silent, cool morning, I am compelled by reality’s transient and illusory nature. The simultaneous coexistence of two states: the object and its mirrored image. The reflection is and is not reality. Both conditions feel true. Like our own reflections in the mirror: it’s us but not us. The two worlds feel equally real, equally important. And so I pay close...
I’m putting on my suit for my nephew’s wedding. Jack and Kristin are getting married today on a perfect September day in Portland, Maine. It’s true: I own only one viable suit, and I haven’t worn it since . . . there’s something in the jacket pocket, and I pull it out—a memorial card for Thomas Grande, Jack’s uncle who passed away last year. This is my wedding and funeral suit. I last wore it at...
“Learn a New Skill.” This item has been on my To-Do list since I started making such a list a couple of months ago. I turned to list-making because I didn’t always remember what I wanted or needed to do, and a few tasks were slipping through the cracks. I haven’t yet crossed “Learn a New Skill” off the list. It makes an encore appearance every few days when I update my list. I’ve dabbled in...
We’re in Snyder’s Shoes in Manistee along the shore of Lake Michigan, where we vacationed with the family for many years when the kids were young and spent a week with Harriet’s sister. The two photos (taken 15 years apart) were an annual tradition. We posed with a statue of the tallest man who ever lived. Robert Wadlow stood 8 ft. 11 inches and survived until only age 22, dying in 1940. He...
The love triangle is a classic narrative device in literature and film. It has been used throughout storytelling history, serving as the structural foundation for prize-winning literature, genre novels, classic films, and B-movies. The love triangle comes pre-baked with powerful story elements such as complex human emotions, moral dilemmas, and social dynamics. Inevitably, there’s one character...
Twenty-five years ago, when Nikki first became my barber, my hair was thick and dark brown throughout. Now it’s thick and dark gray. Together we watched over the years as the hair clippings fell onto the floor around her barber chair. I started by saying, “Oh, there’s some gray in there,” and then haircut by haircut, year by year, some became a lot, and I eventually said, “Oh, there’s still a...
In Ernest Hemingway’s first published novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” there’s a brief exchange of dialog between two minor characters when one asks the other how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” That quote resonated with me because it’s the way I stopped writing: gradually and then suddenly. I haven’t written a blog post in over a month. I used to write ten or...
My head is in the clouds and I’m in daydreaming mode, for how long I cannot tell, but worry not, I’m not delusional or illogical or unaware of what’s going on. In fact I’m all too aware, and my head in the clouds at least means I’m looking up, so there’s that. Give me the towering gray nimbus or the distant hazy puffs or the cirrus whisps. I’m not an uninterrupted blue sky kind of guy. I...
More than a year ago, I received an email from a friend and professional colleague I’ve known and worked with for many years asking me to help him identify his “Unique Ability.” He sent a similar email to a handful of other people who knew him professionally and personally. Unique Ability is a self-discovery tool promoted by Strategic Coach, a consulting organization geared toward business...
During the Battle of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Major Robert Anderson, the Union commander, ordered the U.S. flag to be flown upside down to signal dire distress and to request assistance as Confederate forces were bombarding the fort. More recently, the upside-down flag has been used in protests to express dissatisfaction with government policies or actions, symbolizing a belief that the...
It was our kitchen that got me thinking. Twenty years ago we decided we were staying in our smallish house that we loved and we embarked on a massive renovation. The biggest project was a new kitchen: we knocked down walls to create a bigger, open concept; we installed new windows, floors, cabinets, appliances, and countertop. Now, against any standard of trends and current taste, our kitchen is...
One consolation prize of being the only one home and cooking dinner for just myself is I can make one of my favs that no one else in my household likes: pasta puttanesca. A working-class recipe from Italy, “puttanesca” is an adjective derived from the word “prostitute.” It’s a lively, intensely flavored dish made with tomatoes, garlic, anchovies, olives, capers, and chili pepper flakes. I love...
This time of year when the trees leaf out I remember the American elm in front of my house when I was a kid. Its limbs flared toward the sky like an elegant vase, the branches and leaves spreading a canopy as wide as the tree’s height. The flat, egg-shaped seeds covered our sidewalk and driveway. Then Dutch elm disease made its way to Buffalo, and the elms lining our street withered and the city...
I heard this story second hand, and have been thinking about it for months. A woman I know: her daughter told her she was feeling depressed, disjointed. The daughter was living a coast away at college for the first time, finding her place, nineteen or twenty years old. I’ve met her a few times and remember a smart, sensitive, and savvy young adult. What the mom said to her daughter next is what...
