I was driving to Costco to pick up a new pair of glasses early yesterday afternoon when I heard the first reports of the latest terrorist attacks in Paris. The kind man who retrieved my glasses for me was born in Germany near the French border. He asked me if I had heard anything further than what he had picked up at work. I told him what I knew, and we talked for a little while about why such things happen. About disaffected youth and discrimination and joblessness and the desperate search for some kind of meaning in lives that can find little else than whatever jihad has come to mean. Read more about Nothing

Remember George Carlin’s classic bit on Stuff?

My generation loved it. We thought it was deep. Maybe it’s my dotage showing, but lately I’ve come to think it’s not deep at all. It’s just a cranky guy riffing on a word.

Stuff. It’s a great word that covers a multitude of blessings.
Know your stuff
Do a lot of stuff;
Your morals, your values, that type of stuff.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on… Read more about Stuff

There are a couple of definite changes that have come over me in the last few years, not counting menopause. For one thing, I no longer keep a careful eye out for vampires. For another thing, I don’t freak out when I walk into a spider’s web. Read more about Spider Time

If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Read more about Heat

A piece I wrote several years ago. I thought it worth posting here: Read more about Welcome to Istanbul

Way back in 1960 or so, I wrote a high school essay in defense of advertising, in which I proposed that whether or not products ever did for you what they promised to do, sometimes they could help you feel better about yourself for a while. You put on a certain brand of lipstick (I gave up wearing the stuff aeons ago) and while it doesn't substantially change you, for a while you might feel as if it did and sometimes that feeling is something you need to carry you through the day. Read more about Thoughts on the Mad Men Finale

Diving back into old National Geographics, I recently surfaced with a few treasures: Read more about Pieces of Eight

The rain this afternoon is no more than a whisper. Nothing worth mentioning, really. Last year's brown leaves are caught in the year-round, unremarkable green of the skimmia - I think it's a skimmia - and stuck in clumps, like old birds nests, among the confusions of the St. John's wort. The pots that don't have the dead or dormant remains of last year's plants have sprouted gray green beards of weed and moss. Read more about Uninspired

"She'd drive to the bathroom if she could get the car in the house." So said an old boyfriend of mine about me, and he was so right. He loved walking. I just wanted to set a spell, smoke a cigarette, and read. If we had to go someplace, I wanted to get there as soon as possible so I could sit down, smoke a cigarette, and read. Of course, at the time I was also the size of a #2 pencil, so I didn't really feel the need to monitor my diet or take up anything strenuous. Read more about Working Out

It's early morning, August, 1975. A woman is sitting on the rough boards of an unpainted stoop that leads to the kitchen of her 100-year-old white clapboard farmhouse, holding her new daughter in her arms. She is very likely nursing the baby, as she looks across the yard to a barn that's the same age as the house, a chicken coop, and an ancient log cabin that predates every other building on the place. It's a bright blue morning in Door County, Wisconsin, and she is singing.

Nothing could be finer than to be with Carolina in the morning.