Tag archives: Beings & Doings
This week I join the ranks of Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Tolstoy. Like these towering, culture-affecting giants, I offer my Confessions to a waiting world, to posterity. You see, we great thinkers must ultimately unburden ourselves. What choice have we, huh, Tolstoy? By opening our hearts in this act of generous self-abnegation, we defang […]
Walking onto the wedding site I’m struck by the sense of happy commotion, energized folk crisscrossing the rural property with buoyant industry, faces prone with unconscious half-smiles as they each set to the task at hand. These striding busy bees wear a variety of tats, indelible ink mostly dedicated to soft-spoken renderings of the plant […]
December is the month we remember (among other things) the good deeds of the well-off Bishop of Myra, a 4th century do-gooder named Nicholas. The guy slipped his considerable inheritance under the doors of many a despondent maiden that she might find companionship in that day’s dowry-driven lovefest. Much later we would recast Nick as […]
When I was 12 years old the classic Hollywood star machine was in the throes of extinction (not to suggest I had anything to do with that). Tinseltown was being overthrown by UnmediatedGritTown as a new generation of auteurs stormed the Dream Factory ramparts, broke into the place and tore down the velvet curtains. David […]
When I was about 14, my sister, Jill – an award-winning equestrian – took me horseback riding. I was uneasy with the whole deal because I’ve always been scared of horses. Always. As a seven-year-old I’d lived on Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. That being Cowboy Country (and Missile Country, but that’s another […]
When I was in high school, I was hijacked by Christ. It wasn’t bad. My girlfriend had asked if I wanted to go to a Young Life meeting with her. “Uh, what’s that?” “Just a bunch of singing and hanging out and doing skits and stuff.” My family had relocated to Phoenix from Boulder, Colorado, […]
Centennial Junior High School. Boulder, Colorado. 1973? What happened was this. In PE we were playing soccer (what the rest of the planet calls “football”) and a stocky little guy named Tony kicked the ball out of bounds. Tony was in my German class (please don’t ask), wore his stick-straight hair in bangs and kept […]
“It wasn’t a mutiny. It was the bone-weary ship’s crew selecting – by voice vote – a new captain, one whose brusque nature and laudable transparency in speech gave them hope of precisely the rigorous captainhood the increasing stormy seas obliged. There were trifling misgivings. “The gentleman had been captain once before and had acquitted […]
Often I think my poor oldheartHas given up for goodAnd then I see a brave new face,I glimpse some new neighborhood..– Mancini/Mercer And here we are again. Another …. New Year?! This is a reportedly cyclical occurrence, begat by an explosion that, for reasons I’ve stopped trying to grasp, gave birth to both Time itself […]
My friend and I meet one evening at a seafood place – one of those enormous restaurant/bars with maritime junk hung all over the place in case you forget the theme. Tonight it is thronged and seething, the dank air heavy with excited human congress. The World Series is hollering out of a dozen enormous […]
Our friends were out of town and had graciously loaned us their home while ours was being bombed for termites—a species we’ve completely conquered in the Darwinian Race To the Top®, except for the poison-filled circus tents we’re occasionally obliged to flee with our belongings. On the third day the tent was removed and that night […]
I’d fallen hard for a lovely Dutch visitor to Santa Barbara and made the impulsive decision to drop everything and follow her home. Her name was Judith and “Home” was a lovely town on the Dutch Channel Coast, a place called Monster (etymological provenance: the 11th century monastery that was the town’sseedling) in a province […]
