Out of Rome As I head back home to San Diego in my Jet Blue seat, I have just watched for the umpteenth time, Out of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. There are few movies that I find so beautiful. It is beautiful in cinematography, beautiful in its haunting soundtrack, beautiful in its turn-of-the-century costuming of the adventurous safari set and beautiful in its narration as though we are hearing directly from the…
Slammin’ Salmon Ever since I was a kid, I have had a strong aversion to fish. I, like most people my age, ate my share of fish sticks in my youth and I didn’t hate them, but they are coated with bread crumbs and fried or baked to the point of being a bread stick with some tasteless white stuff in the middle…and a lot of tarter sauce all over them. I think its fair…
Wandering Through Grace When I start a new story like this, I pluck a recent story from the recently saved ones and use its format to delete the story and replace the title. That saves me from having to choose a font and font size and get the alignment right. Today, the old story I plucked from the array was When Will You Make an End, which was about my Hobbit House, but starts off…
A Pleasant Spot Yesterday we arrived in Rome and suddenly went from another large airport (Leonardo Da Vinci Airport at Fiumicino), where, in typical fashion these days, we had to talk about 1.5 miles from the arrival gate to the baggage return. It took so long to walk that distance that our bags beat us to baggage claim area. I think of it as forced exercise, which requires you to broken-field dash through countless glittery…
All The King’s Men Every time I think we have finally gotten past the shadow of the Donald Trump presidency, something takes me back and I find myself thrown back into the desperation of feeling like I’m that poor inmate stuck under the thumb of Ida Lupino, who plays an evil warden in the 1955 film Women’s Prison. The horror of that film is less about what goes on physically in the prison than the…
Dining at Termini It’s Monday morning in central Rome and I have a mission. We are here for a little more than a week with our friends Gary and Oswaldo. We have stayed the last two nights at a nice boutique hotel called Capo d’Africa, which is in between the Coliseum and St. John Lateran. So far we have spent a day walking five+ miles around town to go see some sights like the Boca…
Violence in Never OK Who among us has never gotten so mad or so aggrieved or so aggressive as to resort to violence to give emphasis and voice to our feelings? I believe few men can make that claim and probably most women would be unable to make that claim. I make the gender specification because it seems to me that there is some hard-wiring in the male psyche that defaults to violence when threatened.…
7,700 Steps Through Heaven Today we are in Rome with just a loose agenda of activities. We drove in yesterday from Amalfi and I dropped off the rental car at Stazione Termini while the gang found their way with the luggage to the AirBnB we had secured. The place is called The Spanish Penthouse in honor of the fact that it is at the base of Piazza de Spagna and is, indeed on the top…
Positano Yesterday we “did” the Amalfi Coast. Kim arranged a tour guide who drove over from Naples to drive us (technically, a guy named Renato did the driving) around the winding roads of the coast. After five minutes of the drive I realized that I was the real beneficiary of this choice, since driving and looking simultaneously is a high-risk maneuver, which i could thankfully forego. We start by heading to Ravello to the south,…
A Walk in the Clouds There is a wonderful 1995 film with Keanu Reeves and Anthony Quinn called A Walk in the Clouds. It is set in the vineyards of Northern California and is an epic tale of a family’s struggle to maintain its heredity among the changing winds of time that buffet the world after WWII. There is something about that time and place that resonates with me and whenever I see or think…