Photo by John Griswold “How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?” —WG Sebald, After Nature I know someone who used to say, at key life-moments: I’m going to just [do this one thing], and we’ll see what happens. If you looked…
Photo of an exhibit in the museum, by John Griswold Ms. Charlotte Davis wanted to show me everything. I was standing on the porch of the log cabin next to the museum, and when I turned she had appeared on the steps, an older local lady with tight…
A crowd of thousands at City Hall in Houston. Photo by John Griswold A would-be participant in the Houston Women’s March for reproductive and voting rights stood in a line of three dozen people waiting to pay to park on Saturday morning, in a lot next to Minute…
Anton Chekhov’s home and garden south of Moscow. Photo by John Griswold I live with a blessed patch of pines between me and the main road, so I do not think about traffic much until the screaming sirens fly past, quite close, and I have to wait to see…
Photo by John Griswold Maybe you too have the 2005 edition of The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, illustrated by Maira Kalman. It is one of those books that seems to rise to the surface of piles of books and present its…
Southern Illinois was my first biome, and I still know it intimately, but summers can be miserably humid and hot. Before every major thunderstorm, people in the St. Louis area keep saying this will be the one to break the heat for the year, but today it was in the 90s with 83 percent humidity.
“Flags of Valor,” a memorial outside the St. Louis Art Museum, September 11, 2021. Photo by John Griswold. When 9-11 happened I was teaching at the University of Illinois. My wife was six weeks pregnant with our first son. We were getting ready for work but stopped to…
Photo by John Griswold Start with small seats on the aircraft, smaller all the time, it seems, and the expectation that flights will be full, and no room in the overhead bins, so your bag goes under the seat in front of you, and your feet get pinned…
Superyacht ‘Eclipse’ berthed at the Detached Mole, Gibraltar. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons As I write this, the World Superyacht Awards are wrapping up here, in the Monte-Carlo Sporting, the big venue for society fundraising in Monaco. Guests are moving slowly from the champagne reception into the festive Salles…
Photo by John Griswold We have an old bottle of Macallan whisky given to us by my in-laws, who were Scottish immigrants in the 1950s. They told us that a family friend was a foreman at the Macallan distillery, and he gifted them the bottle on the eve…