Category: creative
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Elegy for a Heart Worn Smooth by the River
I knew my mother-in-law for twenty-eight years before she died this October of respiratory failure at 95 years old, presumably as a complication of the colon cancer surgery she’d undergone two days before. The procedure had taken twice as long as anticipated due to numerous unforeseen complexities. A tumor the size of a plum required…
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Getting Rowdy
Lost It’s been almost a year since we lost our much-loved boxer mutt Guinness, and I remember it with the chill clarity of today’s winter morning. We’d been keeping her kidney disease more or less under control for a long while by then, and though we weren’t measuring the remainder of her life in years…
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Another Pandemic Year
I’ve been plinking away at this pandemic essay since April, in and around routines and the occasional upheaval that, if it wasn’t a proximate cause, Covid-19 always seemed to complicate. Tending an expanded vegetable garden. The weekly CSA/FSA/butcher box jigsaw puzzle of meal planning, with the added wrinkle of our own produce often ripening at…
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Notes from Isolation: Living
God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me. The Liturgy of the Hours comes to my mind often these pandemic days. Not the particulars, but the concept: structuring one’s time around periods of mindfulness and meditation. Structuring them around anything at all. Almost twenty-five years of working at home have taught…
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Notes from Isolation: Planning
For about a week after the Emergency Services director issued a shelter at home order for San Luis Obispo County on March 18th, 2020, my predominant emotional state could best be described as…manic. Before that I had been preparing for the possibility of things going pear-shaped and COVID-19 causing widespread social and economic disruptions. But…
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Notes from a Pandemic
When I was a child, the first time I realized that the comforting routines of daily life were capable of perturbation was during the oil embargo of the 1970s. My father’s avid planning of weekend trips came to an abrupt halt, as did my brothers’ borrowing of the family car. I was occasionally dragged out on an…
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Well Being
2019 was supposed to be the year I rose like a phoenix from the ashes. I was coming off almost a decade of nearly continual stress as my parents’ health failed, and four years of frequent, often abrupt travel between Atascadero and Los Angeles that left me the Marriott Gold Elite member I never wanted…
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The State of the State
The year in politics, for me at least, has been largely a year of breathlessness and angst. I cancelled my subscription to the Atlantic because I couldn’t read One More Article about Donald Trump. At some point the endless drumbeat of the damage that he’s causing to the environment, to civil rights, to our international standing (with…
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La Cuesta Less Encantada
San Simeon is an oddity of a beach town along the Central Coast. While houses in neighboring towns jostle against one another and crowd the shoreline like penguins on ice floes, the only readily visible residences in San Simeon are a handful of tile-roofed Spanish style villas on manicured lots near the shore and, of…
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Some Random Thoughts at the Beginning of 2019
– This time two years ago I was curled in a chair with my laptop watching an angry sea in San Simeon. I planned to return this month, though according to the forecast the ocean would be placid and the skies blue. But a year of too much travel and a bout of post-Christmas illness…
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