October 2021
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A few weeks ago, I found myself absentmindedly working in the perennial garden. I had wandered nearby and noted some weeds that needed emergency extirpation. I had therefore arrived without my usual trine of implements — the dandelion puller, the hand shovel, and the Felco #2. Too lazy to fetch them, I began to tend…
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Among my circle of friends, it is a shameful thing to be called "house proud." It's a term to be avoided, even shunned. It's competitive and flaunts the wrong values. Conspicuous consumption. Vanity. "I own a bigger house than you, and therefore I'm a better person than you." "House pride" is a very badddd feeling…
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Disease, dying and death, I'm afraid. During the last month or so, the cohort of friends with whom I've gone through life has been suffering major losses. BD, a friend of more than forty years standing, has just breathed his last. AM, whom I know from the PS 217 schoolyard, is suffering from cancer of…
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I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their…
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I read a story in an "art of gardening" book many years ago that I will repeat here. A famous Japanese gardener, a "national treasure," was asked, "What's the secret of making a garden as beautiful as yours?" He didn't answer in words but lifted his arms and made a shearing or lopping motion. Many…