Tonight’s post was supposed to be from Durham, North Carolina. I was going to drive down for the week to check on our house, see friends I dearly miss, and then watch basketball games all next weekend with my friend Jay. The NCAA decided that Jay should stay put in Boston. I wrestled with whether…
Tonight Ginger and I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which I thought was going to be a biopic of Mister Rogers, but it turned out to be centered more on a journalist who was assigned to interview and profile him for an issue on heroes in Esquire magazine. (The script was “inspired” by…
The string of cancellations that crowded my afternoon undid several of my spring rituals–March Madness and Opening Day for the Red Sox, to name the two most significant. It looks like it will be a while before I get to use #itsnextyear as I post about whatever the Sox do that gives me indefatigable hope….
After the day we have all had trying to digest information about the coronavirus and then bring to figure out what to do with it, I am exhausted as I sit down to write. Most of the motion seems to be away from each other, which led me back to a poem by Pádraig Ó…
A friend and I used to collect oxymorons: jumbo shrimp, student teacher, El Camino Classic. The current state of affairs has given us another one: social distancing. As I turned it over in my head today, I went to a list of phrases I have been collecting from various sources and put this poem together….
I went to New York for work today and the train ride hope turned into a litany of loved ones who are hurting tonight for a number of reasons. As I sat down to write, I found myself turning to the words–and music–of others. Red Molly is a trio who harmonize like they are related….
Saturday night I cooked dinner for a group of women in our church who have gotten together monthly for many years to share a meal and talk about their lives and their faith. They invited me to come do a sort of cooking lesson and then stay for the discussion. We sat at the table…
I am going to lean into an old poem tonight because I have spent most of the evening cooking and eating with a small group from church. We filled ourselves up with pimento cheese-stuffed pork loin and black-eyed pea risotto, as well as with laughter, good questions, and good stories. This poem feels like a…
One of the things I brought back from our trip to Memphis was my allergic reaction to whatever pollen was floating in the air. I have lived with allergies all of my life, which means I have taken some sort of antihistamine–or multiples of them–for most of my life as well. I have not had…
My head and heart are full tonight, so this post is as well. As the news of Elizabeth Warren ending her presidential bid found me and I realized, as many did, that the election has devolved into Grumpy Old Men 3: Patriarchy and Privilege, I went back to James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching…