Three days ago I was settling down on the living room sofa for a much-anticipated afternoon nap, when a bird smacked into one of the seven big windows that make our living room feel so light and airy. Alas, this sickening thud usually presages a dead bird or one so stunned that our cat, if he can get outside in time, makes short work of. And so it was with some trepidation that I got up to look out the various windows to see what I could see.
Posts published in “Essays”
Without music, life would be an error. — Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 Music (and other) geeks tend to make “best of” lists, sometimes every year. A few years back, I was asked by a now-defunct publication…
(AVA June, 1996.) In-Service Training by Richard Carlson The legislature determined that we needed uplifting and sensitizing, so five or six days a year — the dreaded SIP days (Student Improvement Program) — we went to…
Now We Are Six When I was one, I had just begun. When I was two, I was nearly new. When I was three, I was hardly me. When I was four, I was not…
A heart in love will decipher every squiggle in a letter as a kiss. In the final days of the 2008 campaign and in the opening ones of his administration, Obama and his top legal…
It’s June and I can see trees falling on the steep slope south of the Albion River, part of a Mendocino Redwood Co. timber harvest. Fir and redwood crash to the ground in McKay Gulch…
I am currently in the throes of rewriting a novel I first completed in 2003, rewrote entirely in 2006, and then did not touch for six years. I have only undertaken this kind of extended…