We drove from Granite Springs to Stamford in the middle of the night. You were born in the midst of drama and fanfare. I held you in the hospital room, fell in love with you and have loved you ever since. I had to go home to walk McDougal. I drove back in the middle [...]
She’s young here, not yet 20, and her future isn’t written in her face. She’s experienced sadness. Her father died when she was young and her family was reduced to a mean existence, the froth and frivolity of a town life erased by the shadows of tenement rooms. But she’s smart, pretty and determined. She’ll [...]
A human being is part of a whole…[but] he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest…This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison [...]
On a trail I walk there is an old tree that has given up life but stands rooted stolidly in the ground. The trunk is thick and black. The seasons have embalmed it. The wood is so hard that the bark won’t break off in your hands. The boys pick up stray scraps that have [...]
These young men are waving goodbye as they start the 1000 mile trek from Pittsburg to New Orleans. They’ll skirt the Allegheny Mountains, pass into Tennessee and pick up the Jackson Military Road for the final 400 mile descent to the Mississippi Delta and the bayous and great swamps surrounding New Orleans. They are following [...]
The Bowery in New York City in the early 1920′s. Prohibition is around the corner — then the restaurant will move up to street level and the liquor store down below.
Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road The music flows in and out of your senses as easily as the sweat raises your skin. What [...]
Father Today you would be ninety-seven if you had lived, and we would all be miserable, you and your children, driving from clinic to clinic, an ancient fearful hypochondriac and his fretful son and daughter, asking directions, trying to read the complicated, fading map of cures. But with your dignity intact you have been gone [...]
They stopped us at the bottom of the jetway. We were the first ones to board, had scanned our tickets and paced down the carpeted walkway with the peculiar metronomic intensity of regular travelers. They weren’t ready for us. We were a motley gathering: a tall, thin woman with a pinched face reading a faded [...]
The conception of the library in Stockholm has wormed into my imagination. Then I stumbled upon a curated sampling of bookshelves from Desire to Inspire. Here are two of my favorites. Just like the Stockholm conception, these images create kinesis in my imagination. I grew up surrounded by books — literally, surrounded by books, in [...]