I was working as assistant chowdermaster in Mendocino County's worst seafood restaurant, which shall of course remain nameless. I have no desire to interfere with anyone's livelihood, particularly someone as well-meaning and earnest in their…
Posts published in “Essays”
Several things my father said repeatedly occur to me. The first piece of useful information I recall him passing along, was "Hold your sleeves" when putting on a second or third layer of clothing. I…
My friends and I were renting an old farmhouse in Solsbury, Indiana for $45 a month, ice cream cones were five cents in the little store down the road. I was almost eighteen and felt…
By the time Bruce and I finished getting the grain beds set up on the trucks it was ten to six and we were going to have to hurry to wash up before supper.
It got pretty exciting at the Courthouse last Thursday evening. Wait, strike that! Exciting is too puny a term for the breathtaking exhilaration whistling through the ancient halls of justice. The sense of anticipation was…
There are things my mind does, in its relentless pursuit of inefficiency and procrastination, shouldn't happen to a dog, but one thing it's good for is it slows down and stays steady in the middle…
A week before Thanksgiving at the Fort Walton Florida airport I was met by my sister-in-law Robin, a retired public health nurse who now sits on the board of a local homeless organization. The Crestview…
It's Thanksgiving as I write this — the holidays will inexorably assert themselves despite our (my) best efforts to ignore them, every year like clockwork (or calendarwork, really) — and it occurs to me that…
The famed nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt, author of the seminal The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy first published in 1860, enjoined true scholars to remain at their desks rather than “congregate at conferences to sniff…