(Note: We are heading to New Hampshire this week for the 43rd consecutive summer, minus the Covid year, since we left New England for Houston. It’s inconvenient to post from there for technical reasons, so you won’t hear from me for a couple of weeks. Enjoy this precious summer month. We’ll see you on the other side.) First, unrelated to the subject of today’s posting, I want to report a random...

The two poles of what I loosely call my creativity these days are my garden and my blog. On rare occasions like today they come in conflict with each other. I was eager to start my blog for next week, but the brutal temperatures indicated that I had to first deal with watering while the conditions were still tolerable. Now I’m back at the computer and ready to roll. Rosellen and I were so moved...

The other night, in that final moment of clarity before drifting into hypnagogia, I said to Rosellen, “I don’t think I say I love you often enough.” I’m not sure what impelled me to say it at that moment, but there was definitely a touch of fear that I might not wake up the next morning. I’m writing this two days before my 86th birthday, a point in my life when thoughts like that are increasingly...

I’m posting early this week on the offchance that someone in Houston will read it and be motivated to attend the opening of this show on Friday, so don’t expect anything more from my already overextended psyche on Monday. Although I’m targeting my Houston friends in particular with this posting, I thought that everyone, wherever you are, would be interested in the the story behind it...

I’m sure there are some travelers who book cruises just for the experience of cruising –trouble-free travel to pretty places with a heavy dose of pampering. The specific destination is of secondary importance. That was not the case for us. This trip was about going to Norway; the cruise was merely the means for making that happen. In 1959, after my junior year in college, I set off on a...