Flowering Trees I have written before about my obsession with trees. There is just something comforting and stable about trees. They are big and lasting and weather most storms of any sort. I would suggest that bushes are fussy, but trees are regal. My favorite painting is of a tree on the pampas of Patagonia. I have planted eleven trees on my property in the past four years. They range from a very mature Irish…
Trump Nation I saw the newest cover of The New Yorker and it shows the seated picture of the Supreme Court with Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagen, Ketanji Brown Jackson and then six identical scowling Donald Trumps. The cover article is titled “The Face of Justice” and even without reading the article, I pretty much know what it will say. Now I want to ponder the why of all of this. I have been quite outspoken…
Running and Swimming My daughter, Carolyn, who is spending the month of July with us here on the hilltop, is a marathoner. She has run nine NYC Marathons and countless half-marathons. Last year while she was here, she tried running in the neighborhood only to find it too hilly and too warm for her, so this year she has asked me to take her to the gym so she can run on the treadmills. The…
Hillbilly Nation You know where this is going more than I know where it’s going. I am perplexed and trying to make sense in the broadest possible way with the announcement that J.D. Vance is not only Donald Trump’s last-minute Vice Presidential pick, but that he has suddenly been elevated at age 39 to the national political stage and characterized by none less than Nate Cohn of the New York Times as the future leader…
Nature’s Clock There are certain aspects of nature that we all take for granted. We are all accustomed to the sun rising every day and setting at the end of that day. We have systematized the celestial processes so that we publish reports on when sunrise and sunset will occur. We do the same thing when it comes to the moon and the cycles of the moon and the tides along with it. Seasons are…
Now You Feel It, Now You Don’t When I was about nine years old and already living in a twelve-year-old’s body, I was playing street football in our crackerbox development in Madison, Wisconsin. Those were lean graduate school days for my mother and family, and I either didn’t have a proper pair of sneakers or was too lazy to go home and put them on, so I was wearing leather-soled tie shoes when I went…
The Basic Basics This morning while showering, i started thinking about the difference between things we need and things we want. Let’s start by admitting that we all in this country are blessed by abundance and have pretty much all that we need at all times. It was Abraham Maslow, who in his now famous 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”, established what we now know as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It may just…
It Doesn’t Get Better Literally, as I wrote this title, I realized that these words can move in many different ways. But I decided to stick with it because I am of two minds this morning anyway. I will start with the negative and move towards the positive. I had a real toss and turn night last night and I wish I could attribute it just to my sciatica and lower back discomfort that I…
Finding a Better Way Once the dust settled at the county fair and we realized that I had bought a huge massage chair that looks like a cross between an Eero Saarinen design and something for sale at Hammacher Schlemmer, I needed a solution. Since I was economical enough to buy a floor model (with full warranty coverage and only driven by little old ladies at the fair), I had no choice but to take…
Reading Tea Leaves This political cycle has us all so flummoxed that we are left to read tea leaves and coffee grounds in order to divine the future of our nation and planet. Whenever I use a colloquialism or metaphor like “reading tea leaves”, I get curious about where that phrase came from. Tea drinking dates back to China and the first evidence of it comes from some tea leaves found in the tomb of…