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A Prayer for Yoani Sanchez
Sailing to Havana On the Texas coast, easterlies mean rain, but southeast winds whisper tropical promises. Building in like the trades, they rise after noon to blow every hint of land – burning...
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Sprinklers and Sparklers and Mayo, O My!
Long ago and far away, when temperatures were measured with metal feed-store thermometers hung next to mops and buckets on the back stoop and heat indices weren’t yet popular, we had our own ways of...
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A Time to Make Our Own Groceries
She hangs in my kitchen, this woman with no name who holds a chicken in her lap. She watches me at my stove and sink, and I return the favor. Over time, I’ve come to know a thing or two about her. The...
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Opening Windows, Opening Lives
Even for those whose roots sink most deeply into the salty seacoast soil and whose lives blossom under the heat of a coastal sun, it is a truth tinged with bitter irony. Despite being so eagerly...
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A Season of Singing Hearts
Thirty-three years after I stood transfixed before a photograph of Russian tanks moving into the streets of Budapest, quelling the popular uprising there with determined brutality, true revolution and...
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Cuban Gold
Children of the Cuban missile crisis, we bear within ourselves certain visceral memories unimaginable to students today. Sitting in our classrooms, watching the clocks tick off the implacable hours, we...
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The Power of Imagination
While in the process of completing a post on quite a different topic, I happened across this photo, taken after the recent “closing” of the Lincoln Memorial. I found the photograph distressing and...
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Sprinklers and Sparklers and Mayo, O My!
Long ago and far away, when temperatures were measured with metal feed-store thermometers hung next to mops and buckets on the back stoop and heat indices weren’t yet popular, we had our own ways of...
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Feeding Bodies, Sustaining Souls
Many years younger, fairly well-traveled but still impressionable, I arrived in Berkeley during the 1970s: a relatively peaceful decade sandwiched between the tumultuous events of the University of...
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Swimming Upstream
Detail from “Woman Before a Fish Bowl” ~ Henri Matisse (1922) Walgreens is an impulse shopper’s paradise. Established in 1901, after Charles R. Walgreen purchased the Chicago drugstore he’d served as...
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Sprinklers and Sparklers and Freedom! Oh, My!
Long ago and far away, when metal feed-store thermometers dangled next to mops and buckets on the back stoop, heat indices weren’t yet in fashion. In those far-away times, summer began with mirages:...
View ArticleCivics 101
The Hungarian Uprising, 1956 ~ Erich Lessing, Magnum Photos On October 23, 1956, I celebrated my tenth birthday. There was cake, ice cream, and a small party with balloons and crepe paper streamers....
View ArticleCherishing Betsy’s Legacy
She hangs in my kitchen, this nameless woman holding a chicken in her lap. She watches me move between stove and sink, and I return the favor, attentive to her placid presence. Over time, I’ve come to...
View ArticleFreedoms, Large and Small
Long before the advent of The Weather Channel, weather existed. Metal feed-store thermometers dangling next to mops and buckets on the back stoop recorded summer’s rising temperatures, while pools of...
View ArticleThis Hour, and That One
Sunset on the prairie After lying dormant for months, the familiar complaint rises again, grumbling across the land as the days shorten and nights grow cold. Repetitive and predictable as the season,...
View ArticleSwimming Upstream
Detail from “Woman Before a Fish Bowl” ~ Henri Matisse (1922) Walgreens is an impulse shopper’s paradise. Established in 1901, after Charles R. Walgreen purchased the Chicago drugstore he’d served as...
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