I was recently chatting with Jan Pallazola and she mentioned the current project of the Save the Redwoods League purchasing a conservation easement on the Maillard Ranch. So I found the flyer online and was…
Posts published in “Essays”
One of the great pleasures of living in this rural area is that many of my neighbors and friends are avid observers of the natural world. And so in early August when I began sharing my observations that maple trees and fruit trees and blackberry bushes here on the coast in Mendocino were behaving as if it was late September, many folks concurred with similar observations about the local foliage and fruit.
Three of us, the brother/sister team of Nick and E.B. along with yours truly, started our planned ninety-five mile trek on the John Muir Trail late in July. I can't remember leaving anyone behind on…
So I got invited to a public shaming…and being a retired librarian and thinking the family to be shamed disgraceful…I decided to do something I’d never done before. Attend. Being a ballot proponent for Measure…
Of course I couldn't wait. Waveland Avenue. Of course it's the street outside the left-field wall of Wrigley Field, Chicago. I'd been doing some Frank Lloyd Wright, some Hemingway, in Chicago and some Buddy Holly…
Music was arguably more crucial at the ancient Olympic games than at the globalized modern ones, where it not only buttresses big ritualistic moments—the opening ceremonies, the doling out of medals—but insinuates itself into the…
Among the countless contradictions that the Olympic Games bring into relief is that between private and public music. There is a chasm, unbreachable even by the world’s best long-jumpers and sharpest-eared eavesdroppers, between the individual…
Len Feinstein was born in Brooklyn, and raised in Levittown, Long Island, the famous original tract development where every house was essentially the same to cut costs. “My father bought one of the later ones,”…
I hate to keep flogging a dead horse, but some things manage, through sheer black-hearted cussedness, to continuously prod one's ire and therefore demand public excoriation. Last night I was on the yard after the…