His maternal grandfather, named Rakin, was the rector of The Episcopal Church of Columbus, when Tennessee Williams was born in that Mississippi city on March 26 in 1911. His paternal grandfather, one Lanier Williams II, a man of accredited lineage, squandered a fortune trying unsuccessfully to become governor. His mother Edwina was capable of managing a man, a beast, or a storm. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was demeaned during his military career as a simple ne'er do well and wound up as a traveling salesman for a shoe company--a job which permitted him to visit the whorehouse of every place he worked.
Posts published in “Essays”
I've been recuperating from some unidentified type of virus, a flu or something that refuses to exit completely. For close to a month I have felt drained, energyless; it's hard to put one foot in…
I waited 16 months for Sonoma County to issue their report on the spraying of my grapevines. I did not get a call as promised, but at a social occasion I happened to learn that…
The publisher of the consolidated Mendocino Coast newspapers is retiring. In modern parlance her 23 years as publisher is considered a long tenure. Long before those two papers were taken over by corporate interests and…
We’ve been picking up our neighbor’s Press Democrat while he is away in Idaho hunting elk. The headline article of the Sunday edition is about the shortage of rental properties in Mendocino and all over California and America due to so many people choosing to go the Air B&B route with their rental units rather than rent long term to locals.
"Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost." — Leonard Cohen "Our lifelong cynicism about the American character has been vindicated. I Told You So has never felt worse. On the…
(Hal lives in Lake County with his wife, Susan Sparrow, and is the author of more than 20 successful books, including Write From The Heart -- Unleashing The Power of Your Creativity [2011], The Lens of…
"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." This sentence flitted across my consciousness recently, apropos of nothing at all, and got me pondering. I think it's supposed to be a joke…