When I was six, having arrived mid-year in Mrs. Bushnell’s First Grade class at Las Lomitas Elementary, I won my first friends by telling them stories at recess, stories I made up. And there came a day when Mrs. Bushnell was desperate for a nap and asked us to put our heads down and nap with her, but Donny Dorset protested, “We’re not tired, Mrs. Bushnell. Couldn’t Todd tell us a story?”
Posts published in “Essays”
Three hippies linger in the former dining room of the Farmhouse, lounged on sectional sofas and recovering from the first annual "Rakefest" Friday night. It's now Sunday afternoon, the clouds finally breaking after three days…
My valet Clive and I were in our Fort Bragg offices playing backgammon and discussing economic theory when the knock came on the door. I was no match for him on either front, being down…
When it comes to piano scenes in movies I go for the kind that are keen to dismantle the homey myths that surround the instrument. In and around the seemingly impregnable bunker of the living…
The just-released movie Spotlight is about a Boston Globe investigative reporting team circa 2001-02 that uncovered and documented a vast network of child sex abuse by priests in the Catholic Church that had been on-going…
On this evening I was walking home from the censorship office to the Florida Hotel and it was raining. So about halfway home I got sick of the rain and stopped into Chicote’s for a…
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott’s famous metaphor, the last line of “The Great Gatsby” applies to motorcycle touring, for much of…