As I, like many have mourned the death of James Lipton, who hosted Inside the Actors’ Studio, I learned he wrote a book, An Exaltation of Larks, which is a “lovingly curated ode to the unique collective nouns that adorn our language.” As a way to honor him, and because I, too, love collective nouns–words…
Some nights I sit down to write with a heart full of stuff to say; other nights–like this one–I rummage around through my notes and scroll through pages looking for inspiration. Such is the nature of a practice, I suppose: sometimes it is easier than others. Today is the sixty-fourth anniversary of my parents’ wedding….
minor gifts when it comes to campaigns major donors give big bucks minor givers give lesser gifts and are, thus, less on lots of levels but minor in music means melancholy a flatted third makes a home for sadness and songs in the key of grief one note changes a chord one moment changes a…
threat landscape who knows what’s out there hiding in the hills or in a handshake I could get hit by a bus or a brick or the morning news hard enough to knock me flat on my back what happens next is just waiting until I drop my guard or my keys I don’t know…
Here are some of the songs that speak to my heart in these days. I offer them to you as traveling companions. As a part of our Ash Wednesday service, I sang Emmylou Harris’ “Prayer in Open D” (which, parenthetically, makes me think someone needs to do an Emmyloucharist, much as they did a U2charist)….
Congress passed a bill yesterday making lynching a hate crime–a hundred and fifty years late. As the bill states, “At least 4,742 people, predominantly African Americans, were reported lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968,” and so, in the election year 2020, Congress finally said lynching was a hate crime. Emmett Till was…
I’ve been thinking all day of how to meet you here, as my Lenten Journal begins for another year. Tonight I was looking through some notes and found this quote from James Baldwin in an article in Brainpickings. Once people know what they know, they make the unconscious assumption that they were born knowing what…
Last summer, Ginger and I got to go to Dyersville, Iowa and visit the farm where Field of Dreams was filmed. The baseball diamond is still there, between the house and the cornfield. We were two of only a handful of people walking around, so we played catch, me on the pitcher’s mound and she…
My family moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia in 1957. Back then, that required sailing on a passenger freighter from New York to Beira, Mozambique, which took thirty-two days. I turned one in the course of the journey from Texas to Africa. None of us had much idea of what we were in for. Though Southern…
A friend gave me a book for Christmas–One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle. Because I received several books for Christmas, I didn’t get to start it until last Sunday morning. As I read the dustcover (you should always read the dustcover), I learned the volume I held was a posthumous collection, put together…