All the big holidays involve pleasure-by-glut, from the gifting of Santa to fireworks on the Fourth. Glut is a celebration of freedom from want, but it is important to these particular gluts that they arrive by an external source of magic, which covers its tracks with prosaic details. The reindeer have […]
April is not “the cruelest month.” It is, with March, the windiest month. As such, these months are the best of the year to find or build a kite, find a grass-filled open space, and feel the delicious tug of wind stretch down from the sky, down the twine or wire suspending your […]
A Russian acquaintance I will call Ivan, the Head Supervisor of Cultural Education at a state cultural site, was kind to me and a friend on our trip to Russia in 2014. Since then, Ivan and I have exchanged greetings by email a few times a year. “Merry Christmas to you and […]
It can be confusing to civilians that the branches of the U.S. military (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard, and now Space Force) have different but often overlapping missions. Branches often train together in the field and cross-train in each other’s schools. I served in the Army, for example, but […]
“Walking-around knowledge” is an odd phrase. Do you use it? I do not know where I first heard it, though I suspect it was in my childhood or army service because it feels like an older construction my elders would have used. The presumption was that seeing and hearing things firsthand—to […]
For one romantic night away, two days of cleaning, prep, and angst? This neurosis is not like me. Someone else staying in our home was never a big deal. But then came lockdown, and an easy domestic chaos that never ended. Our recent trips have been separate and brief, no dogsitter needed. Now, […]
Does gravity have commitment issues? For months on end, it grounds and steadies us, then at the least topple, it sucks us off balance. Classic ambivalence, I would say. Drunks and babies fall softly because they are not arrogant. The rest of us fall hard—in love, off the wagon, from glory—and fall so […]
When I woke from the nap it was dark in the room except for the lights on the tree. I was headachy and confused, and when I moved, my laptop woke too and lighted my face. The neighbor, coming home from work, was walking past my window just then and glanced […]
I was explaining to my son how classical Asian poets known as Stonehouse, Cold Mountain, Spring Essence, and Bashō (a raggedy, unproductive form of banana tree) took pen names from significant places or things in their lives. These names have a comic quality now for their simplicity and the way they […]
I bought a new Christmas tree: there is a phrase that should tip you off. I never had an artificial tree in the house when our sons were little. Every year, real pines filled the high-ceilinged bay window in our old house or pressed the ceiling in that other house. Their […]
