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The Old Becomes New
O to be young again! Wait! I am! Beneath the cold ground of winter, youth, young sprouts, are percolating, putting down roots, rising to the sun. I am with them, young again, lifting my arms, raising my voice.
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I shook the applesauce in the plastic jar
I screwed my courage to the sticking place, and with the desperation of all my strength, tried again. I gritted my teeth, became a tyrant, refused to succumb, and the seal and turned! What an interesting life life is, when you stop to notice and think about it.
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The Genie and the Bottle
If wishes were horses… My daughter told me her latest joke that goes like this: The bottle-finder un-corker was scratching mosquito bites. The first wish was, “I wish all blood-suckers were gone from the world.” Suddenly all mosquitos and fleas vanished, all the Royals and half of Washington DC disappeared.
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Buzzing Helicopters Swarming
Helicopters seem to be everywhere, all the time. It’s hard to find out what’s going on. It’s hard not to be paranoid about it.
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Norman Rockwell
The quality of art is measured by how long it makes you look at it. An essay about the painters that shaped my life, including Wyeth, Pyle and Rockwell.
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Labels categorize, establish status, and proclaim it
Know when to label. What does the label tell us, aside from the capital letter of primacy? Change the label, or remove it.
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The Grand Canyon
A musical travelogue in which I may or may not have visited the Grand Canyon. Read on and you decide.
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The Need to Talk
Talking fills a void. I talked so much for so many years, you’d think I would learn to listen to myself, know what I was saying, and when to shut up. I’m working on it. I’m a slow learner. Too often I don’t know what I don’t know.
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Thought for the Day
The internet regularly posts a Thought for the Day. It’s good to have something to think about. Many people don’t.
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Global Warming is a Hoax
Post-apocalyptic thinking without rapture. The story that follows is fiction, the problem is not.
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Jupiter and Saturn
Chaz was whistling Holst. The Planets. Jupiter. I said again, “It’s my favorite, because it’s so whistlealongable. You can set your mind aside and go with the flow.” Chaz said, “I have a special place in my heart for Saturn.” “Yes,” I said, “yes. It has a ring to it.”
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Record Stores
There’s hope for the world at several speeds. We made it through ’33 and a third, survived ’45, shifted into high gear in ’78, and now we replay the memories.
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That Tree’s Gotta Go!
“Watch what the marble does when I release it.” He released it. We watched. The marble rolled north. The tree is on the south. The man got excited. He was a professional. He had gone to marble-rolling school and had a certificate. “See? If the house was level, it stays.”
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Yes, I can lie with the best of them
I come from old school. We learned, and used to know, the difference. Right from wrong. Good from bad. Law from un. Love from hate. It’s a new world, not a better one. Not yet. I can say the world is flat, because I know so many people are.
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The American tourist tries to make his case
Stereotypes are always partly true. “We do wish you weren’t so typical. We can tell you’re American by the way you look, talk, eat…” “We can tell you’re European by the way you don’t.” “You don’t understand Democracy!” “You still have Kings and Queens!”
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I looked into the eyes of an octopus
I work at the aquarium. The octopuses are my favorite. Then, one night, as I was doing my job, making my rounds, the bigger octopus, the leader of the pack, looked at me, and I looked back. We looked long. Our eyes sent messages. My mind opened to receive them.
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I am Navajo
“We’ve been driving for hours, needed a pause, and your reservation looks welcomingly real. We’re not the typical tourist. The castles in Europe are worth a look, but we wouldn’t want to live in them.” The young woman’s projected thought didn’t register until these many years later. “So you’re Navajo!”
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Situation Hopeless
It’s a mindset. There’s a certain resilience in a vanished Empire. We can learn from the past, even if it’s not our own past.
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Not Every Time
I’m a selective hoarder. Kristina said, “Dad, you keep all that stuff? Do you also keep receipts every time you fill the gas tank of the car?” I said, “Not every time.”
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What do you (can you) do when something’s broken?
What do you (can you) do when something’s broken? If it’s the government, you can fix it with courts and laws and like-minded people. Are you ready? There’s always something. As Hamlet says, “The readiness is all.”
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Don’t eat poison
Poison is bad for you. That’s why bad people who want to poison you use twisted extractions, evil substances that have no smell or taste. They’re a crime against nature.
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Marriage Can Save Your Life
Not the way marriage should be. Disclaimer: This is not a true story. But please, read on…
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Why you may never have heard of me
Food and music and love can democratize the world. Water moving underground can unite the continents. You don’t have to have heard of me, or realize that I’m part of the equation, because you are too. But I think it’s better when we know each other. Let’s shake hands. Let’s have lunch.
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Children Shrieking
It used to be that the undereducated ignorant were told to hold their tongues. Now we are ruled by a pack of wild dogs. Run for the hills! Run for your life! The world is getting louder.
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I miss Benny Hill
I still miss Benny Hill. I want to laugh. Alfred ‘Alfie’ Hawthorne Hill – Benny Hill – considered by Chaplain to be one of the greats. Benny spoke fluent French and passable German, Italian, Dutch and Spanish, and everyone who knew him said he had a heart of gold.
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Ken Russell’s view of The Planets, and the Moon Landing Hoax
Sometimes more is less. I just saw on Classic Arts Showcase, the last part, I tuned in late, of Ken Russell’s cinematic response to Holst’s The Planets, Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. Russell conflates videos of joy and energy, pure jollity. They augment the music without competing with it.
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The Concert
A story. Music democratizes. All of us can lead. Together. Take the case of the orchestra, and a conductor who sometimes goes missing…
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Too Clever by Half
Here’s the other half. This time I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget what I thought about while sleeping, for safe-keeping, on an envelope beside the bed, a handy pen next to my head so I could empty out my brain and catch the drops and not complain…
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The Old School Family Doctor of the Young Me
The old is superseded by the new. That’s the nature of things. Children supersede their parents. Old School Doctors are superseded by Modern Medicine. But here’s the Good News. Many people, and I’m not just talking Doctors, combine the best of the Old and New, the then and now.
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Another Solution
There are many solutions to many problems, some better than others. To fully understand a fascist, one must learn to think like one.
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Newscaster says
Newscasters shouldn’t make such obvious mistakes in grammar, but often do, trying hard to sound correct.
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I don’t disturb the ashes
I opened the top once and looked at them. Shirley wasn’t there. Four years later, I go days without looking at the box. Ashes are a reminder of death, loss. But they’re not Shirley. That’s why I don’t disturb the ashes. Shirley is still alive in every part of me.
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What is it this time?
It’s something I’ve wrestled with, or at least thought about to inconclusion, for more often than I like to admit. It has to do with the impulse to create, the dissatisfaction with the non-existence of the (in this case) work of art.
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Out of Order
Reconnecting with a former student, now a teacher in Moravia in the Czech Republic. David Livingstone, what a pleasure to learn of your adventures!
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How Could Anybody Not Like Avocados?
I grew up poor, so I never had avocados when I was young. I knew they were green inside. They call that color “avocado green.” I later learned that you eat them with a scooping spoon. A little salt, a squeeze of lemon, a little olive oil, and heaven!
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The Plague Columns of Europe
One thing I noticed everywhere were the plague columns. They were usually downtown in the square, prominent columns of twisted bodies piled up with faces in agony.
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Bookstores Part Two – Morro Bay
We visited Coalesce Bookstore in Morro Bay, California. This is one not to miss!
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The effect writers have on readers
The Great Writers are good to us. We rise to their level when we make a critique. They have infected us with their rhetoric and alter our internal chemistry. The only cure is to stop reading, a cure worse than the disease.
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The Disparity of Means and Ends
Life. And then there’s the conductor who shakes a stick at the orchestra. But sometimes the question is “who is doing the conducting” and “what is being conducted?”
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Look Twice
How strange the world is, when we see things that are not there, and even they disappear. I must defend myself against vicissitude, and look at everything at least twice.
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There Used to be Bookstores
Books were sacred. You can smooth your hand across a page and caress the words and stroke the letters. Books are tactile, to the hand and to the mind. Books have that certain book smell of presence, you can smell it when you enter any bookstore. The internet doesn’t smell.
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Shirley the Firebird
I just saw part of the ballet, The Firebird, on Classic Arts Showcase. They broadcast free 24 hours a day, and this was something I had never seen. It’s the part where the Prince captures the Firebird. I thought of Shirley. Now and forever.
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My Failed Science Experiment
I toyed with the notion of continuing with the project, further experimentation, but my practical side, abetted by my inherent laziness, decided, “No,” and “Why bother?” and “It’s somebody else’s experiment and they’ve already learned what they wanted or needed.”
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Read This Book
I am shaken to my core I am reading the Altadena Poetry Review Anthology 2026 after the Eaton fire real poetry real poets language at the limit everyone should read this book
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I think it was Vienna
I think it was the Vienna Philharmonic. We used to watch them on TV for hours. They performed every year at the New Year’s Concert in the Musikverein, when culture was regularly broadcast.
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Aliens in the Arts
There’s something going on. I’m not paranoid, but I can’t trust anybody. The invasion began centuries ago when people did things they can’t do now.
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All the Time in the World
I’m referring to the time when people, everybody, knew things because they knew how to think, and did. They also knew how to read, and did, which gave them something to think about. We used to read books. Now we have the internet.
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ICE on the Barbie
Meanwhile, back at the farm, they’re feeding the goose and eating the dogma.
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Chaz the Gourmet
I’m going to call him Chaz the Gourmet, though he modestly declines the title. He likes to explore restaurants, bakeries, reads about a place, what customers say about it, what the place says about itself.
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What the Camera Sees
The camera lets us see things we couldn’t before. I’m watching TV, and O My God! There’s the Prez falling asleep in court. There’s a government official picking his nose. There’s the wife moving away as the husband reaches for her hand. There’s the startled look as the newscaster thinks, “Did I hear what I…
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Compression Socks
What sadist invented this torture device? In the middle ages, it was the rack. [Not the clothing rack for fashion, another kind of torture, like wrack and role.] The old Romans tied you to four horses and tore you apart in disparate directions, unless they gladiatored you in the arena with lions and tigers and…
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Tracey Ullman
I’m mad at her. We used to watch her on Television. Shirley and I both agreed that she’s the best, almost unbelievably good, gifted, talented, and so funny you can’t help yourself from peeing in your pants. We even saw her live. She was taping an episode in Burbank for her show, and a friend…
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What’s it all about, Algae?
It takes a special ability to solve problems before they start. That also goes for wars, and extends to Reflecting Pools. When you’re looking for something to distract the populace, and the war isn’t working,and Epstein is lurking, and the real work you’re shirking,you just keep on smirkingas loose ends you’re twerking,and quick easy rhymedoesn’t…
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Ballerina Swan Arms
Chaz just swam through the room with his arms undulating like a manta ray’s swan arms, which ballerinas practice and practice to subdue the elbow to a boneless flow of rhythmic rise and fall, where flapping is too harsh a word until at the end of the dance the swan realizes she’s dying and flaps…
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Limerick from Memory
My memory is full. We were in the kitchen getting coffee (or maybe breakfast, or lunch, I don’t quite remember which) and Kristina and I were talking and she made a snappy rhyme. She was an English Major at Berkeley and got her B.A. Degree. I, one up, have a Master’s in English, taught English…
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How often does that happen?
How often does something that’s going wrong suddenly goes right? Probably about as often as something going right suddenly goes wrong. More often, if you’re that kind of person. And I mention it because, if you are, you don’t have to be. You can change. All the Mental Health experts say you can, and that…
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What should I write about today?
I should find a subject, something worthwhile. Everything has not been said, and even if it has, it bears repeating. Robert Reich posts every day, sometimes twice. So does Heather Cox Richardson. Dave Hurwitz posts three times a day and already has 5,000 posts and counting. People say, “How do you do it?” They say…
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iPhones in the classroom
It used to be a sea of faces. Now it’s rows of top head hair, faces looking down at the device in the hand, iPhones in the classroom. When I was still teaching, maybe thirty years ago, a dictum came from the Principal’s Office, one of the few best things she ever did: “No cellphones…
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Soprano with the long brown hair
“I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair.” I presume that means blond. And I visualize it as long. Shirley had long hair. Light brown. She said, having learned it from her Mother, “A woman’s hair is her crowning glory.” She was glorious. She brushed it every night, religiously, 200 strokes. I loved her…
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Transgressions
Occasionally I confess to transgressions. Take, for example, the recent blog post of The Drunken Giant. I confess to plagiarism the way a President may say, “It’s true if I say it is.” This is intended to exonerate the miscreant and avoid prosecution. We remember of course the famous line from the movie: “You can’t…
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The Drunken Giant – A Parable
There was a Giant. He was drunk on power. He stomped on people as he staggered through the countryside. People got out of his way. They tried to distract him. They said, “Go over there.” They brought him gold. “Here,” they said, “Gold. You like gold. See? We’re your friends.” He took the gold. Then…
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Born on the Fourth of July
250 years is a long time, and since the National Celebration was botched, and controlled television didn’t want to show it, the crowds of twelve people heading for the exit, I felt we should do something to remember the day. Kristina said so too, and Joanne Freeman, a historian she follows, mentioned her tradition of…
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Advance Reservations
We were going out to dinner. We went to a restaurant we always wanted to try. It had a reputation. We entered through the doors and approached the Maitre’d. “Reservations?” “Alas, no. We are happy to sit wherever you place us.” “We have a table available on the seventeenth of next month at 6:00. Will…
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Thank you, Tony Hillerman
Tony Hillerman is helping me remember my life. I started reading Hillerman maybe forty years ago. I was teaching high school English, and revised the curriculum. We had a required reading list. Some of the kids complained that the list was too long, the books were too long, some were boring, and why couldn’t they…
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Happy 250
A birthday celebration for America. I feel passionately about many things, maybe most things. I’m an emotional guy. I’m a passionate American. Not because America is perfect. It’s not. But America is known as the last best hope, the land of the firsts, the home of the brave, the hope for the future, a beacon…
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The longest word and the rules of the game
When I was teaching classes in school, we played word games. We looked for the longest word in the dictionary, and found it. Antidisestablishmentarianism. We wrote it down and counted the letters. 28. For years that was proclaimed as the winner, and everybody knew it. I talked about the conservative nature of dictionaries. They are…
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Gilgamesh
I had forgotten about Gilgamesh. The epic was one of the earliest things we read in my first years at UCR. They were starting us at the beginning. It’s the oldest recorded epic, nearly intact on clay tablets, where the symbols are pressed in as cuneiform. Though I’m a slow reader, and had trouble keeping…
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Narcissus Not the Flower
The ancient Greeks told stories way back when. They had a big empire, everybody knew they were smart, and they loved the stories. Then the Romans took over the Greeks and had their own empire. They knew how smart the Greeks were, and made them teachers, and told the same stories in somewhat new and…
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As I remember it
I write down history from what I remember reading over the years. I suppose I should do some bona fide research to back me up, but what’s the point? History is written by people who piece together bits from here and there, accounts of people writing hearsay of events. Even eyewitness accounts vary, depending on…
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“We’re doing the best we can”
History, as I remember it, is full of ups and downs. Years ago I wrote a sharp-edged poem about the then President at that time, Mr. Ronald Reagan, who won the election because he had been in movies. This was after he had nearly ruined California, almost destroying the University of California, and saving money…
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Misheard
Sometimes I mishear things, believe what I misheard, and act upon it. A case in point: I heard Mario Lanza (not the famous Irish soprano, Mary O’Lanza) sing the song “Someday,” when he sings the line, “When the winter is over,” and I heard it as “When the wind hurries over.” I sang it that…
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Poppies
a spillof poppies down the hillfillmy viewto see me throughanother daywhen there’s that devil to paythe California poppyis the State Flowerno sappyhomilybroadcast every hourto make me forgetthis Greatest Statecould be its own countryexcept thatwe’re more Americanthan Washington D.C.those ineptprevaricarianswho do not follow where we leadthe last best hopelike poppies spilling down the slope
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Open House at the Altadena Town and Country Club
The sign is still there at the Calaveras entrance where Hill Street goes down past the golf course, still green, which you can see through the chain link fence that used to be covered with vines of trumpet flowers, clematis, and wisteria. Every year the Country Club sponsored and hosted an Open House. It was…
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Job Interview
I’m not qualified. When can you start? Is tomorrow soon enough? What are you doing right now? I’m here. I’ll walk you to your office.
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Paella Night
My mouth is watering. I love food with a passion. Eating remains one of the great pleasures left to me. Paella is one of the basic food groups. It’s analogous but not similar to stew, one of those composite dishes where you throw in everything including the kitchen sink. Ingredients may vary. On a bed…
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Women’s Lot
I was a freshman in college when they explained it all. It was a required Humanities Course that put history in context. Eve gave Adam the apple and it stuck in his throat, we lost the Garden, and she’s paying for it ever since. Pre-history. The earliest man. Before language. The Vast Universe surrounded the…
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“Nudity was kept to a bare minimum”
That’s something I read recently on the internet. It sounds like an unintended joke pun. That’s what language can do, make felicitous but unexpected juxtapositions. Even great authors do it, and when you point it out, they say, “You’re right. I didn’t notice that when I wrote it.” If I had access to great writers,…
