Posts published in September 2016

As I was watching the walking, talking public relations stunt that is Pope Francis capering on television, soaking up all the love and adulation bestowed on him by the apparently dewily naive and childishly gullible…

(London) It’s my first trip back to Britain—or England as I now make a point of calling this parcel of the disunited island kingdom—since 2015 and since the Brexit vote of this past June. As…

In the chilly hours of morning we folded our tent, rolled our rain fly and gazed up toward the steep climb ahead. There are higher passes along the John Muir Trail (JMT) and starker elevation…

It's light out though the sun has yet to pop through the horizon. The nuthatches and chickadees greet me as they visit the two birdfeeders a few feet from one of the kitchen windows. There are a few cardinals feeding on the ground underneath the feeders, their speech a reproach: tch, tch, tch.

I was 13. It was 1958. We lived at what was then the outskirts of suburban Fresno. Down the street about half a mile was a large boysenberry farm. (Boysenberries are an early 20th Century…

Gene Wilder died in August. He was eighty-three. Thinking about him took me back to the first time I saw the movie Young Frankenstein on the big screen in San Francisco in 1974. And I remember feeling as I watched the film that I was witnessing one of those extremely rare creations, a work of art that would never grow old and never be successfully imitated—the result of the unique chemistry of six superlative actors and a brilliant director, none of them duplicable: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Terry Garr, Peter Boyle, Madeline Kahn, and Mel Brooks.