To Listen Is To Be Strong My youngest granddaughter Evelyn just started Kindergarten. She did well in her science-oriented nursery school (her father is a bit of science buff), but as the younger of two sisters, we don’t tend to think of her as the brilliant sister. She has the image more of the spunky sister. But truth be told, Evelyn is actually very smart. I’m glad I said it that way since the word…
McDonalds On My Mind For ten years I taught at Cornell on Monday evenings, ending at 7pm and then getting in my car for a four hour drive back to NYC. I have a house in Ithaca, so I’m still not sure why I did it that way, but I did and it lasted ten years with very few exceptions. Part of the routine was to stop at the East Hill Plaza, which was on…
Feelin’ Prickly No, I am not in a bad mood and I am not annoyed with someone or something…at least not at the moment. It’s just that when I have stuff to do, I have such performance anxiety as a natural part of who I am that I get that prickly feeling in my backside. I imagine that the feeling itself is somewhat primordial and comes out of the cerebral cortex rather than the cerebellum.…
Too Old For Adventure Something came over me in the past week and I don’t know that I can explain it. I got an email from the local BMW motorcycle dealership saying that on September 18 they were having a special event to celebrate the new BMW R18. This is a massive new transverse twin with 1,800 ccs of displacement. That means each cylinder has about 900 cc’s (almost a full liter) of displacement between…
Sticky Finger Politics I went through my normal ritual of reading a recently written story to Kim. It’s my way of editing (I catch many, but not all, mistakes editing this way) and it helps me to read the story aloud so that I can determine if the story hangs together the way I intended. When I finished my reading I asked Kim what I should write about next. I have a ritual process for…
The Circle of Life One of my friends who reads this blog regularly just emailed me that while he enjoyed the story of the day and found lots of new and interesting references, he was not uplifted by the story because its theme was one of the reality of the human condition. We all have our mood swings and I guess I express my through my writing. I have been accused many times in life…
Coping It is a foggy morning on the hilltop today. My mind is geared to my garden and I enjoy a misty or foggy morning for the benefit of the moisture it brings to the plants. I also know by now that it is just a matter of a few hours before it will burn off and it will once again be a sunny and glorious day. It is Sunday and I have the pleasure…
See You in September The Happening was a 1960s cover band that actually had a great deal of success playing and recording music from other bands, but injecting their brand of harmonizing and more upbeat tempos to make the song more their own. They did this with many big hits ofthe 60s including Go Away Little Girl, I Got Rhythm, Why Do Fools Fall in Love and Make Your Own Kind of Music, just to…
In the Land of Nod Somewhere along the way in my education, I always thought of the Land of Nod as being in the state of sleep and drowsiness, referring to that haziness that occurs when we traverse the land of wakefulness into deep sleep. The reference seemed onomatopoetically appropriate since it envisioned someone’s head nodding off into slumber, but just barely such that there was still borderline consciousness. It is in that moment when…
Going to Hospital Today will be my second day visiting Kim in the Scripps Hospital in LaJolla, arguably one of the best hospital complexes in the world. Those visits and wandering those largely cavernous and vacant halls set me to thinking about what goes on in hospitals. I suspect that now, during this continued Pandemic, most of us are doing our best to stay as far away from hospitals as we can. That is far…