For music lovers possessed of even a dollop of reason September was a grim month as paeans to George Gershwin crescendoed toward mega-sforzando on the 24th, the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Aside from their…
Posts published in “Essays”
Selma sat in a corner of the big couch in her parents’ living room, hands folded neatly in her lap. Her father stood in front of her, stern and larger than life. “If you marry…
I was riding a city bus to the diner for breakfast, and on the way, I glanced out the window and noticed a bum sprawled the long way across the bench in a bus shelter.…
And then there’s Bali, a name of guaranteed glamour, known to all. Before the Second World War, I had heard of incomparable Bali from aristocrats of travel—those who could pay for the expensive journey— and…
After three weeks on the road, 3,000+ miles by rail on AMTRAK and 4,996 driven in a rental car what did we learn wandering around Americas in mid-summer? It’s green, it rains, and there is…
It’s a hot quiet weekday morning in Falls City, Oregon, which is more of a town than a city, at least by the standards of a northern Californian who has lived in Santa Rosa and…
San Francisco, to me, is like a house of cards: postcards in glowing colors stacked against the hills that march from the Bay on one side to the Pacific Ocean on the other. The real…