On the coldest morning of the season, when the day dawns just above zero and the expected high is only 5 degrees; on the same day when the windchill will plunge to the minus double digits, and I’ll drive home through pockets of swirling snow so thick, the road disappears, River begins to blow out his coat. It began as a net of fur coating my hand whenever I pulled on his ears and ruffled…
Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw he cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars. —Vladimir Nabokov I spent late Christmas day and the next morning with Lucia Berlin. Greg made a present of her recently published memoir, Welcome Home, and I picked it up immediately. As I read the book not once but twice, Lucia’s voice came back to me–earthy and rich, but…
Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours– –Thomas Campion Winter arrives, just in the nick of time. I’ve been rushing and rushing pulling the threads of my daily to-do lists tight, holding my breath for what seems like months now as I stare down the barrel of a glorious three week holiday break which—Ready-Set-Go!–begins today. Instead of a long sigh of relief, I have a whole kettle of items shoved from the back…
Home is my great white whale. For as long as I can remember I’ve searched for it, turned the thought of it over in my mind and longed for the coordinating x and y of permanence and thriving for the perfect place. Growing up, I wanted to be from somewhere, but my family, kicked around by my father’s Air Force career, tumbled from state to state. Back then, home was neither a haven nor the…
When Miranda utters these words in The Tempest, it’s clear they are the words of a naif. She’s young and sheltered and–frankly–lusty. Her “brave” means handsome; Miranda is all about the surface. Most who invoke these words miss Shakespeare’s irony or haven’t read Aldous Huxley’s novel by the same name—What they summon, instead, is excitement about a changing landscape. For our new Emperor without Clothes, the phrase is clearly spin. He’s the confidence man selling…