We’re well into the Golden Anniversary of the sixties and I’ve scheduled in the Free Speech Movement’s Reunion in September in Berkeley. I expect to be in Paris with other “soixantehuitards” in 2018 if my…
Posts tagged as “essays”
For my birthday last October my brother gave me the coolest warmest San Francisco Giants jacket, a stylish melding of orange and black fabric with a smallish team insignia on the chest directly over my heart, and a grandiose insignia on the back, centered under the word GIANTS writ in large white capital letters outlined in orange. Little did I suspect that this jacket would prove to be a magical loosener of the tongues of countless men and women who had previously looked upon me with suspicion or indifference.
The curse that shaped the life of my grandmother, the lives of my mother and her brother, the life of my brother, and my own life, has finally been lifted. My brother and his wife lifted the curse, and their daughter Olivia, my charming niece, is the prime beneficiary of their heroic reversal of our family pattern, though I feel gifted by that reversal, too.
Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque nineteenth-century cemetery just to our north. Down in the gorge immediately to our south the creek builds momentum ever hour as the thaw…
Vaccination is one of history's most significant health advances. But California has had outbreaks of measles and pertussis in the past year. California also has a rising number of children not vaccinated for such diseases.…
This April puts us five years short of the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe's popular novel about an island castaway is thought to have been inspired by the experiences of…
I met Peter Matthiessen once when the Friends of the Library were selling books at the Koret Auditorium in 2001. Matthiessen was featured speaker at a program in the “Writers of the Land” series sponsored…
We can't see the city of Decatur from inside this prison, but at 9:30pm, we hear the city's sirens wailing in the distance, alarms that signal the worst disasters: floods, fires, plagues of locusts, nuclear attacks, and, of course, tornadoes.
A “Second Chance,” after 25 years of absence and silence, was recently offered Shepherd by Assumpta. Her email arrived from Europe to his farm. We met in Barcelona in 1988 and have had no contact during the last quarter of a century. I answered her email within 15 minutes of its sending, without thinking, but with a deep feeling of connection.