You’re driving at night in a General Motors compact car, a Cobalt or Cruze or Ion, and without warning the brakes, gas pedal and airbag suddenly give out. You hurtle into a tree and kill…
Posts published in “Essays”
Pretty much like today, those – like me – who lived in Anderson Valley from the 1950s through the 1980s depended on cars to get around, pickup trucks to handle hauling (except for logs, lumber…
The recent drought in Northern California made me think of the last one back in the mid-seventies when I was living about six miles up Sherwood Road on a friend’s 20-acre property without electricity or…
As opposed to Robert Frost's two roads diverging in a wood, it is often the convergence of two paths that proves just as unexpected and consequential. I have spent the last weeks of winter and…
Country inhabitants of the Ohio river valley have endured the most arduous winter in memory, at least for people 77 years and younger. While the blizzard of '77 lingers on in family photo albums, with…
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (Viking Press, 1939, 619 pp.) turns 75 this year, and for many decades it has been regulated to juvenilia, to high school students, to young people inept at work…
Since medieval Germans attached pedals to their organs way back in the 14th Century, the instrument has been as much a gymnastic apparatus as a tool for musical expression. The most famous report of J.S.…
Marcia and I are on the two-movies-a-month plan from Netflix, and many of the movies we watch are foreign films and documentaries.
Since I am, at the very least, a semi-regular Contributor to the AVA, and haven’t contributed anything for awhile, I figured it was time to protect said Contributor Status, and submit an article. The term…