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...
I’m not a dedicated social media user. I have a LinkedIn account but use it only to keep tabs on a few professional contacts. No Instagram, no TikTok, and no other platform that I happen not to know about because I’m too old or not cool enough. I fiddle with Facebook, mostly as a lurker and tracking old friends, with the occasional shameless self-promotion to persuade someone, anyone, to buy one...
Day after day I get preoccupied with petty concerns, and then a shift in the light has a way of nudging me to get out of my head and look up from my desk because there’s something I should see right outside my window, it will last for but a few moments in a world that keeps turning, so take a break and experience the wonder, then go back to your little problems if you must.
April 20 (4/20) is weed day. The day got its name in the 1970s in California when a group of high school students met after school around 4:20 to get high and 4/20 became a code phrase they could use in front of their parents. Clever stoner types, these high school kids. The reputation of 4/20 spread from there. 420 Magazine, founded in 1993, has a mission around creating cannabis awareness. I...
First the freezing rain fell and the world turned to glass until the temperature climbed just enough and the ice became rain, just rain, torrential and unrelenting for hour upon hour under heavy iron skies until the thermometer dropped back down and the rain froze again and the snow soon followed with jaw-dropping ambition, the inches quickly piling up, nature flexing its heavy muscles, and then...
