A friend visiting New York, knowing of my fascination with Mark Rothko, texted me a picture of one of his paintings (in MOMA or someplace?). This led to a conversation with my wife, Lissa, who reminded me that she and I, years before we knew one another, had both been to see the 1979 retrospective …
Lissa has been nurturing this hedgehog cactus since we brought it back from Tucson a couple of years ago, wondering if it would survive our Albuquerque winters. This morning, it started putting on a show.
Lissa and I ended a bosque walk yesterday lingering on the bench from which the photo above was taken, talking about aesthetic vision. Her art has long focused on textures and patterns, and we stopped again and again so she could take pictures of leaves – not individual leaves, but leaves in community, golden on …
Continue reading ‘A note on some trees in the Rio Grande bosque’ »
Trying to remove a gizmo from my bike yesterday that was stuck because of a stripped hex bolt, I had occasion to root around L’s tools for a hammer, something small and precise that I could use to carefully tap the gizmo loose. I remember this hammer from my childhood. It was Dad’s. Lissa reminded …
BOULDER – I spent a few nights last week in a $200-plus a night hotel in Boulder, Colorado, that someone else paid for. It was bigger than the first apartment Lissa and I lived together in. That’s privilege, I guess? There was some Colorado River stuff going on in Boulder – huge thanks to the …
My sister, Lisa, and I had an amusing exchange this morning as we drove home from the funeral home with Mom’s ashes. She was pretty sure I had Dad’s ashes at my house, but I had no memory of where we’d stashed them. That’s the way it has ever been between us – she’s the …
Some time around the middle of March, 2020, I found the above sign in a quick clip art search, printed it, and stuck it up with a piece of yellow masking tape on the door of my office at home before our first Zoom class. Or maybe my first Zoom lecture recording, I don’t remember …
Continue reading ‘The Pandemic and the Magic Masking Tape’ »
Martin Reber, a distant relative, tracked me down to share this picture of my father, for which I will be forever grateful. We don’t know much about it, other than the scrawled message on the back suggesting it was taken within a few weeks of VE Day as my father’s unit moved into Germany. Dad …
The sun is shining, the grass is green The orange and palm trees sway There’s never been such a day In Beverly Hills, LA But it’s December the 24th And I’m longing to be up north – Irving Berlin The backyard of my childhood home, in the foothills above Upland, California, was a remnant of …