In storage lockers we offshore the domestic. We place there the things that will not fit in our homes, until they can be brought in from the cold. It is not direct metaphor, but something more like signal or sign, that the often unheated (or hot, humid) little rooms are something like relationships. […]
Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle, 2020-2022, is a fascinating and unusual graphic memoir. In the book’s 476 pages, Brodner has captured the feel of the first two Covid years by drawing one image every evening from that day. These range from biographies of people lost due to bad […]
My original sense of place, represented graphically, might look like a drawing a child colors with a crayon: back and forth, tongue-out determined, empty spaces between the lines. This was how I learned my childhood house, my hometown and region, as I traced the same paths over and over. Later I moved to […]
The memorial service for Joan Didion, who died December 23, 2021, was held this week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. (You can watch it here. There is no audio during the slideshow at the start.) Organizers explained the service had been delayed due to Covid, but […]
Sometimes when you feel the weight of everything—all those space rocks grinding away senselessly, nebulae billowing, nuclear fires ejecting plasma, the oppressive silence of your own existence building on some little planet of a Sunday afternoon to the realization that buying that eggplant on a whim at the supermarket on Thursday created a […]
A multinational corporation was investing in environmental initiatives, and I hoped to write about them. Their main project was highly technical; for background they had me email two university scientists. The scientists could not easily explain to a layman what they did, and besides, they admitted, what they were working on would not […]
On a trip to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis this summer, a wonderful thing happened: my younger son suddenly thought of something he would like for his birthday. My kids do not want things, usually, which makes holiday gift-giving difficult, so I was happy to hear it. We were in the […]
A woman in a nearby town has died, only in her mid-70s, and strangers have gathered in her yard to walk through her house to see if they would like to buy her things. The house was built in 1945 and at a glance looks off-balance, taller than it is wide. It seems as […]
How many times in my life have I worked in that particular position: squatting or kneeling, one hand holding up a heavy piece of furniture or machinery, the other hand using a screwdriver, Allen key, or crescent wrench on it delicately? It is the trick of heavy and light labor at the same […]
I would bet that at least once every day of the week (except Monday and Tuesday), there is a young guy with a beard and wraparound shades on the back of his ball cap, or an older guy with a T-shirt that says something like, “For those I love I will do great […]
