“The busy bee has no time for sorrow.” — William Blake I am not a master gardener. I’ve been growing vegetables and flowers and herbs for fifty years, and at various times I’ve made my…
Posts published in “Essays”
We rode out of St. Julien, across the bridge over the Dordogne River and a mile down the other side of the river. We turned right on a side road toward a settlement called Le…
This article first appeared in the AVA in June, 1996. (I have included an excerpt from Wikipedia about Mr. Blackburn as introduction/background. — Mark Scaramella * * * A memoir of author/lyricist Tom Blackburn Dirty…
Let me whisk you to 1980 on one of Obama’s miracle drones. In the right-center we had incumbent President Jimmy Carter, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo. True his top foreign policy man…
“I would suspect that the hardest thing for you to accept is your own beauty. Your own worth. Your own dignity. Your own royal pedigree. Your priestly identity as one who blesses and is blessed…
Your average Mendocino County shopper probably wouldn’t think twice about purchasing naturally flavored incense. The key words are “naturally flavored.” The natural flavor in some incense is castoreum, made from the secretions of the sacs between the anus and the external genitals of beavers.
This morning on the 38 Geary inbound in San Francisco a woman, head down reading a book, was wearing a black velvet floppy hat with a button that had a message. Dear Jesus, it began.…