Category: Essay

In Italy they say, “Non c’è due senza tre.”  Which means, roughly, stuff happens in threes.

The expression comes to me tonight. I’m lying in bed with my wife in Mariposa, California, where we’ve come to visit our son and his wife. Behind the barn where they make cider, above which they have a comfortable one-bedroom apartment, there is a big backyard. In this big backyard, at all times of day, a bunch of deer. Also in this big backyard, a 26 foot camper, in which my wife and I are trying to sleep. Above this big backyard, a big sky totally free of light pollution. I’m urban, with memories of the rural sky I lived beneath when I was a kid. Since we got here, I’ve reminded myself a few times: go out there at night and look at the stars. Tonight is special. We’re waiting for the eclipse of a super blood moon. Well, I’m waiting. It’s a long wait. The eclipse will begin around 2:45 a.m. and will be at maximum at 4:15 a.m. I want to see it. My wife wants to sleep.

Continue reading “Moonwatch” →

On a weekday morning in October of 1971 I got creamed at the corner of Buck and Lawndale Roads. The car I was driving, a VW Bug, collided with a van as I drove through the intersection. On three out of four corners, all flat farmland, field corn had reached its maximum height.

I would have crossed that intersection at approximately 35 miles per hour (no stop signs in any direction), my view almost totally obstructed by corn. I would have been listening to Jethro Tull on the 8 track tape player in my car, the music turned up loud. I would have been mildly buzzed. It was my practice at the time to take a few hits on a joint or a pipe on the way to class. I had started my second year of college. I had a career goal in mind. Behind me, on the back seat of the car were notebooks, textbooks: public speaking, sociology, economics, principles of accounting. 

I was told weeks later: after my car was struck it rolled (a VW bug would roll like a ball) into a woman’s vegetable garden on the one corner with no field corn.

Continue reading “Gone and Back” →

A few years after he went to New York and started his work in advertising, my son came home for a weekend visit with a skateboard under his arm. He said he rode it to work. Over the next day or two, he stepped outside the house a couple times and rolled around the neighborhood on it. It was a nice board, almost three feet long, with the same lines as an actual surfboard and heavy duty wheels underneath it. I’m pretty sure he called these wheels “trucks.” He rode it with no protective equipment, no helmet, no wrist or knee guards. I tried to picture him rolling around Manhattan like that. His mother was not happy.

“Wanna take it for a ride?” he asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

I passed through the skateboard phase when I was a kid. We didn’t call them “skateboards.” They were “sidewalk surfboards.”

Continue reading “The Summer of 1964” →

What’s for supper? 

When I was growing up, we called the evening meal supper in our house. At mid-day we ate our dinner. This was Midwestern parlance, perhaps typical of farm families, from which both of my parents came. At mid-day we didn’t eat “lunch.” A lunch was minimalist, more substantial than a snack, less substantial than dinner. It was a mini-meal. You ate lunch at school, out of a lunch bucket or lunch pail. (The more delicate term “lunch box” took a while to arrive.) North of town was a little restaurant called Lynn’s Lunch. On rare occasions we ate supper at Lynn’s Lunch. I don’t think I ever had dinner at Lynn’s Lunch.   

Continue reading “Home Economics” →