The water from our well smelled like rotten eggs and tasted terrible. We bought bottled water for drinking and cooking. Bottled water was delivered once a week in five gallon glass bottles that we put on a ceramic water crock dispenser. In 1968, two five gallon bottles cost a little over two dollars a week. […] (Read more)
In photography, composition is everything. Good composition means an identifiable subject and background, balance, point of view, and simplicity. It takes time to frame a shot that meets my criteria for good composition. Sometimes I have good results and sometimes not so good. Sometimes I am surprised. I used to be surprised. When I shot […] (Read more)
My grandmother gave me a copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy.It was a sunny May afternoon in Sacramento several days before my tenth birthday. Gramma could never wait for the actual day. If she had a gift to give, she had to give it. We were on the front porch of her house […] (Read more)
In Woody Allen’s film, Midnight in Paris, Gil has a fantasy about being transported back in time to Paris in the 1920s. Call me Gil. My Paris fantasy began with reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in 1965. NPR’s “All Things Considered” was my favorite news program when I was on sabbatical at the University of Southern […] (Read more)
My dad was a health food nut. Long before there was anything like a health food craze, Dad blazed his own trail. Carrot juice was Dad’s answer to good health. He lugged 25 pound bags of carrots home from the market and we drank carrot juice for breakfast. He created a special concoction from carrots, […] (Read more)
Sunday is a day off from blogging; but, I decided to make a change in the focus and organization of my personal blog challenge. I began the challenge with a plan to write 26 blog posts on each of 26 themes. Poetry is first theme I chose. To date, I’ve written 14 posts on 14 […] (Read more)
I heard John Ciardi speak when I was a freshman in college. At the time he was poetry editor and contributor at Saturday Review. His reading of “On Flunking a Nice Boy out of School” impressed me. When I happened to come across the poem some years later as a teacher, I photocopied it and kept […] (Read more)
After the dark cold of winter, the sight of golden daffodils tossing their sprightly heads in the breeze is a harbinger of spring. In April 1996, I organized tour to England for Fr. Edgar Parrott, an Episcopal priest and friend, who wanted to offer his congregation an opportunity to explore the roots of the Anglican faith […] (Read more)
Miss Baumgartner read Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem “Lifting and Leaning” to my ninth grade English class no doubt to illustrate a point. I brought the poem home to my parents. Mom and Dad liked the poem so much they bought a copy of Best Loved Poems of the American People that became one of my […] (Read more)
Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, read Horace’s ode “To Licinius” on the PBS Newshour shortly after 9/11. Horace’s counsel to Licinius is to pursue the middle way, a path of evenmindedness and equanimity. The middle ground and compromise are far from what is heard in today’s angry ad hominum public discourse. What strikes me about Horace’s […] (Read more)