Often when I practice the organ I’m immersed in the immediacy of each successive moment of music-making. Act and sound conjoin in the uninterrupted present. The best concert performances remain in that heightened state, but…
Posts published in “Essays”
How did we go from hippies sucking on the Green Nipple in the Roaring Eighties to the scene today with large legal pot plantations, surviving mainly by breaking the rules and selling weed on the…
Many seasons ago I was dragged into service by a softball team I’d never heard of to play a position I’d never played. It went poorly. For the second time in my life I was…
I was midway into my first cup of coffee one long-ago morning when my 16-year-old daughter plopped her one-gloved self (it was the height of Michael Jackson mania) down at the kitchen table and informed…
Memories of Wolf Creek are etched in my mind forever. I will never forget my first trip. We drove north from Boonville through the giant redwoods. The bright day almost turned to night as the…
For an elder, (or for anybody in fact) contemplation of the tableau of US history can become a habitual 4th of July conversation.. As commonly told and commemorated on Independence Day, our nation’s story begins…
Was it hot in Ukiah last week? It was Thursday when the sun quit spinning in the sky and the meteorologist heat index registered between OMG and WTF. Yeah, well I’m a Buckeye. Weather in…