Another Memorial Day has come and gone in Ithaca’s ramshackle nineteenth-century civic graveyard that sprawls over some twenty hillside acres between the flats of downtown and the campus of Cornell University on the bluffs above. Once a grand landscape park that housed the dead beneath neo-classical crypts and mighty obelisks, the cemetery is now a neglected oasis for mischief-makers and dog-walkers: many monuments have toppled over; the facades of the city fathers’ imposing vaults are ruined.
Posts published in “Essays”
That's it! I'm through with Donald Trump! Somewhere, some ones are hard at work making ink for these pens I use and I continue to squander it on that walking compost heap. It's a slap…
I’m in San Francisco for an organ concert tomorrow night at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church on the edge of the city’s Tenderloin District, and a stone’s throw from St. Mary’s catholic cathedral, that giant cross-shaped…
Not to put too fine a point on it, America coughed up Hillary Clinton like a hairball last week — the catch being it then had to swallow the Cheeto-colored bolus called Donald Trump. It…
A good man passed last week, a hard-working, hard-laughing man. An honorable man. His name was Rodger Tolman, and I had the good fortune to be one of his many pee wee basketball players back…
William Heeser, born and raised in Koblenz, Germany, proved more than fluent in English by the time he reached the Mendocino Coast in the 1850s, a gentleman of thirty something. Within a few years he…
The Panthers’ soaring season crashed dramatically last week when they were beaten 2-0 by arch-rivals Calistoga and were eliminated from the play-offs. Following postseason Championships in five of the previous six seasons, AV had moved…
The leaves on the trees in Retiro Park in Madrid are turning burnt orange and brown, the umbrellas are in hand. Autumn is here and it is splendid. The number 9 bus goes to the…