Honestly, for many reasons, I don’t know whether to share this memory or take it to my grave. Twenty-two years ago about this very moment, as Linda and I were driving home from Gulf Coast Medical Center, it hit me with “Oh my God, ...” -- an overwhelmingly intense, even obsessive emotion of love,  bonding with a child, and realizing what had just happened to me. Kristen had just been born to our daughter Malinda.  A few weeks before the birth, we had been told the baby is a girl, and a protective and possessive feeling had set in on me. The baby’s mother and her husband the baby’s father had been divorced some six months earlier, and the child’s father was gone -- in South Florida, actually, working on reconstruction after Hurricane Andrew. A few minutes after the birth, our niece Joy came and got us in the waiting room and led us into the -- I guess it was the birthing room, where Malinda was lying in the bed holding the baby. Joy picked her up and asked, “Does anybody w...

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:  People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. -Haruki Murakami, writer (b. 12 Jan 1949) What an interesting thought. One of the best things to show up in email five mornings a week is Wordsmith, bringing a.word.a.day and "A Thought for Today" from Anu Garg, who over the weekend wrote an apology, no that’s not the word the word is apologia, for his email overload. I agree with his view that one cannot have too many books, or dictionaries, or words. In fact, a trauma of moving is the dilemma about my books, and I’m going to figure out where to put the one remaining bookshelf. Linda wants a different piece in the powder room, so I’ll find another spot for the bookshelf. But Anu’s thought. Besides the thought itself, the most important thing that struck me about it is Murakami’s word “maybe,” a really good word that if more of us used it more often as basic to our thinking and our being, there might be less hatred and violence. Beca...

2:17 AM but I was asleep by 6:56 PM, so seven hours sleep. We worked ourselves mercilessly to make the house ready for showing and were beyond exhausted, same for days on end. It gets your attention. Thursday I totally forgot a clergy luncheon because of it. Friday morning we hadn’t dripped faucets because the forecast was 32F but early it turned out to be 29F so I pulled clothes on over PJs and rushed to the house to drip, then just stayed working upstairs clearing out my office, the ante-room off the back stairs that we call the fire escape, and the walk-in attic, taking down bookcases and moving them into the attic. It was after 10AM Friday morning when I looked at the time so, still wearing pajamas for underwear, I kept on keeping on instead of going for my cardio exercise.  Three rooms and the attic still show signs of our once having been. 43F and 66%. Our winter, fingers crossed that that was it, lasted, what? three days, eh, in the thirties and dipping into the twe...

My mother had no patience with anyone who said they were bored. She was always doing something, in seventy-five years I never once saw her idle. Reading was major, before her eyes went bad in her middle and late nineties, she read at night, three or four novels a week. From young childhood she sewed, loved to sew, make things, clothes, curtains, slipcovers. She made clothes for all the girls in the family, cousins as well as Gina. And she made my shirts when I was in highschool and at Florida: once as I walked across the quad to class another student stopped me and asked where I bought a shirt I was wearing, one with pictures of old cars all over it. I told him "my mother made it." He asked to buy it and I said it's not for sale.  Along with the slipcovers, she also learned to upholster furniture, did several large living room pieces beautifully. About ten years ago a bed in the house needed a headboard, I brought a door that had been taken down, and she whipped out a ...

to love earthly things My cups are out, readily accessible, and now I can use a different little treasure each morning. I won’t picture it, but today a teacup Tass & Jeremy brought me one of the times we went to Tallahassee as kittysitters while they were in England visiting his family. This is the only cup I’ve ever seen like this, clear glass with a thin, wiry metal frame. It shows beautifully the clarity of tea or coffee. The collect says, “Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love heavenly things.” But I love this little cup and have anxiously guarded it all these years. It has memories too. T&J brought it to me in August 2001. Up until then, our kittysitter stays were Linda, me, Kristen, and Paint (the grandchildren’s name for Linda’s mother). The morning I’m remembering, Kristen and I had an adventure to the Junior Museum’s restored old village, went home for lunch. Right after lunch as Paint was walking down the hall, she had a debilita...

29F at the moment, low humidity. “Mind the Gap” reads the sign on my coffee mug. Bright light from a barge some yards off my window, was there this hour yesterday, aground. Two tugs pulled on it Wednesday, accomplished nothing but muddying up the channel. Maybe larger tugs or a higher tide. Is it blocking traffic? One ship is scheduled into port today, if I were retired other than title only I’d sit here and see.  Didn’t drink it fast enough, that final sip of coffee went cold sitting there on the chilled window ledge. Not complaining though, 6F in Ann Arbor at the moment. BTDT, in fact, fifty-two years ago this morning I was trudging off to class in much colder. We lived a mile or two off campus, a bitter walk going and coming. Would I do it all again? No question. Go Blue. All of it? Yesterday, Hagerty had a piece on the pleasure of driving classic cars, with a picture of a 1953 Buick, first year of Buick’s V8. Doing it again, I might drive that yellow 1951 Cadillac in my dr...

During our Japan years we lived on top of a, well it was the ridge of a low mountain, wasn’t it, looking out over Tokyo Bay to the east, and down on a Japanese neighborhood that was as ancient Japan as one could imagine. In the wee hours, sleeping with the windows open, we would wake to a distant clop-clop-clop sound and the wail of a flute from far below -- the “noodle man” wearing geta, those old wooden sandals, and pulling a noodle cart along the narrow cobblestone streets in the neighborhood, playing a mournful tune on his flute announcing his presence, he had hot noodles for sale, breakfast for early risers.  It was Yokohama at its most quaint, and we loved it. Maybe my only tour of duty better than my first sea  duty. Well, maybe WashDC. Being high up above Yokohama, our nights were usually clear, with wonderful views of the stars, and I took up astronomy as a serious hobby. I read every English language book on astronomy, the sky, moon, planets, galaxies, telesco...