Category: creative
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Birds, Water, and Lazy Weekends
As my SmugMug galleries can attest, I love taking photos of birds. So when Skip’s boss loaned us his telephoto lens my first thought was to head out to Atascadero Lake and its teeming flocks of ducks and geese and grebes, with the occasional swan drifting elegantly among them, to see what I could see.…
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Being Candid
Sometimes I wish I enjoyed photographing landscapes more. They’re so blessedly…stationary. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about taking pictures of children and wildlife during even my short tenure behind a camera, it’s that it’s extremely difficult to capture them in their natural state. One tends to run towards you, the other away. I…
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Eighty Six Christmases
I suppose I feel as if it’s my job, along with taking care of my mother’s financial and medical affairs, to try to convince her that as long as she’s alive there is joy to be found, at least occasionally, somewhere, from something. In pistachio ice cream or lights on a Christmas tree or a…
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New Camoldoli Hermitage
I had been looking forward to a few days alone at New Camaldoli with unseemly eagerness. When August arrived I had a broken elbow, a dodgy lower back, and a fretful elderly mother who thought I was going specifically so I’d be out of her cell phone range. I spent the week restless and preoccupied.…
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Atascadero Lake
Atascadero is a town of about 30,000 inhabitants nestled between more well-regarded siblings San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles. It was founded in the early 1900s as a utopian colony by an entrepreneur who was indicted several times for mail fraud and who perhaps didn’t realize that his beloved community’s name, loosely translated from the…
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Azar at the Fair
Azar set Kleitos Leonidas’ water – with its precise double helix of lemon and orange peel twined around four cubes of ice – on the small table between their two chaises. “I gotta say, boss, this is a great place.” He clambered into his own chair with an umbrella-topped Mai Tai. “I thought we were…
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Unstately Estate
The week surrounding my parents’ estate sale was, perhaps, more eventful than I might have liked, a trickster deity’s bulleted list of “what can go wrong, will go wrong.” Friday, February 1st Early afternoon Late afternoon Evening Saturday, February 2nd Morning Afternoon Evening Sunday, February 3rd Morning Afternoon Evening Monday, February 4th Morning Afternoon Evening Tuesday,…
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Not Going Gentle
Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light. For the past few months I’ve thought about little else, and I think about it gingerly: Dylan Thomas meant something more noble than this. * * * My eighty-three-year-old father is…
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Zosima Panopolis
Jordan was drawn to Zosima Panopolis from her first Mountain Pose. Who knew just standing could look so good? The flared black yoga pants and black tank top, the glossy raven hair cropped short except for a single scarlet micro-braid tossed over her left shoulder, the heavy black eye liner and burgundy shadow should have…
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State of Grace
I. The Burial of the Dead Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers. When we pull up in front of my parents’ house I notice the trees first. The almond whose slender shimmering leaves splashed my bedroom walls with pale green light as I studied Eliot, then Heidegger,…
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