Since the U.S. is sure to pass one million Covid deaths (970,000 and counting), it might be opportune timing that a new mental disorder diagnosis has just been added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): Prolonged Grief Disorder. The DSM is a comprehensive classification of officially recognized psychiatric disorders. Published by the American Psychiatric Association...
Fighting through a maze of rocks and winter’s dead leaves, this harbinger of spring, two crocus blooms, purple and gold, determined to be seen and I saw them, surprised and pleased. War and death and disease and hatred—and still, hope springs eternal.
That’s right, it’s Pi Day—March 14, or 3.14. Or 3.141592654 and on and on, with no repeating pattern. What does one do on Pi Day? Bake pies. For those who may not remember Euclidian geometry, Pi, represented by the Greek letter π, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. For any circle, the distance around the edge is a little more than three times the distance across. Two...
Tapped the tree, cooked the sap, made breakfast. We’ve got four mature maple trees on our property and I tapped two of them this year. The time to tap is when the nights are below freezing and the days warm up enough to get the sap flowing. On a good day, I get a half-gallon of sap from each tree. On a frozen day, nothing. Tapping a tree is the easy part. Drill a hole, stick in a tap, and...
Thank you Julia and Owen for helping bring our snowy friend to life. It’s funny how this guy can brighten your mood.
Maybe you do too, but I have days firmly in a dark place. I wake up that way. The writing goes poorly, or I say something I regret, or the news of the world has me down. Maybe Prince Happy keeps telling me how life is good, but I’m still feeling like the man in black. With all the light I have, still the shadow looms. I know the playbook. Get mindful and meditative. Savor, savor, savor...
People used to place personal ads in newspapers in hopes of finding potential mates. There’s a steamy Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin thriller, Sea of Love, in which Pacino plays a cop who goes on date after date trying to identify a serial killer that’s using the personal classifieds to lure his victims. Ellen Barkin is either the femme fatale or the love interest, or both. The days of personal...
Harriet’s in Florida for a few days visiting her mom so this was an ideal time for me to finish painting her closet doors. I’d been careful about moving her clothes out of the way of my brush while sliding the overlapping doors back and forth to gain access to the edges and the sides. I was on my third coat of paint, since I was covering dark wood with white paint. And then I noticed it: a...
I’m not a good meditator, when it comes to closing eyes and focusing on the breath and clearing the busyness of my mind. I get restless, I get bored, and even if I have what I might call a “good meditative session” I don’t notice any positive aftereffects. But put me in front of my fire, close to the heat, and I’ll watch the flames perform. Where will the tongues will flicker next and which piece...
I got a Facebook message from a woman who said her granddaughter has “her heart set on being a writer.” Said granddaughter is always writing in her journal and writing poems and stories. Grandmother wants to know if I have any advice or tips she can pass on to her granddaughter. Sometimes I think there’s more advice out there about writing than there is actual writing. Do a Google...
What book are you reading? It’s called “Maus.” What? Where did you get that? The school board made it very clear that book was being removed from the library. Noelle lent it to me. She owns a copy. You’re not supposed to have that book. It shows people hanging. It shows the Nazis killing kids and there are naked people in the book. Schools should not be promoting that kind of thing. They’re not...
I must have been ten or twelve years old when my father took my brother and me to the old Rockpile—War Memorial Stadium—on Buffalo’s east side to watch the Buffalo Bills take on the Washington Redskins. It was forever ago. The Bills quarterback was Jack Kemp, who went on to become a U.S. Congressman. The Redskins quarterback was Sonny Jurgenson. I think I fell in love with the Bills on that warm...
Have you seen the new commercial for Apple Watch? It’s both appalling and brilliant. The first thing Harriet said was, “I want that watch.” In the first 911 call, we hear the audio of a woman after she flipped her car and it’s starting to fill with water. The second call features a paddleboarder who has drifted out to sea. The final emergency features a farmer who has fallen from a ladder and...
“And so we shall have to do more than register and more than vote; we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with enthusiasm.”Martin Luther King Photo by Steve Schapiro Sadly for Martin Luther King, Jr., even the first part of his desire—to register and vote—is beyond reach. The second part about creating leaders who...
I got a cool pickleball paddle from Julia as a birthday present. Today she took me to where she works at the Y so I could play on the courts they set up in the gym. A few guys are my age. A couple are younger. A bunch of them look older, although I’m good at fooling myself that way. There are just as many women players and in the same age range. I walk up to a guy wearing a tie-dye shirt and say...
