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 …
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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 …
A seven word sentence – eight if you think “gonna” should count for two. It is my measure of my mother, the number of words she can string together into a sentence without break. The sentence does not have to make sense to me to count. It merely has to have an internal grammatical coherence, …
On its centennial, there is no question in my mind about the central role of the U.S. National Park Service in my life’s trajectory. I’ve written often about my experience as a young boy, standing on the Grand Canyon’s south rim, wandering the view spots craning my neck for those fragmentary vistas where you can …
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Some years ago, my adult child gave me a pair of rainbow unicorn socks. They’re really nice, comfy socks, but in a complicated way. They are quite literally comfy – thin and stretchy, made of a high quality fabric. More than that, the rainbows and the unicorns are for me an assertion of comfort in …
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Surely some art historian has puzzled through the impact of the GI Bill on the history of American art. I noted in the PBS Newshour’s obituary this evening that the late Ellsworth Kelly, after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, went to art school on the GI Bill. My Dad was part …
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Walking after Christmas eve dinner, we came upon a rainbow of luminarias around the corner from our house. The luminaria is a tradition in the southwestern United States, a little paper sandwich bag with a bit of sand in the bottom to weigh it down and a candle to light the way for Christ’s spirit. …