Autobiography
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This post is written for my children, grandchildren, and any potential future descendants. Aunt Mollie was an important person to my in earlier years. She should be remembered. Mollie was my father's older sister. She was born in 1900, the third of the four children of Isaiah and Eta. She was an extremely private person…
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"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope…
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Last night I woke from a dream with this peculiar phrase repeating itself in my half-conscious brain: "it fills my onion heart with fear and trembling." I have a couple of questions to ask of my capricious dreamatorium, which although capable of creating passable iambic pentameter is rarely self-explanatory. a) What is "it?" What is…
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When we built the summer house/cabin/hovel in 1977, we needed to dig a well, and someone, probably the plumber, hired a dowser. I didn’t approve – I would have hired a credentialed hydraulic engineer. For me, dowsers belongs in the same crazy box as astrologers, phrenologists, flat-earthers, Shakespeare-author conspiracists, along with the lunatics who report…
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As a rule, I keep my distance from live performances of a Shakespeare play because I seldom enjoy the experience and regularly find it misleading. This has not always been the case. A few versions, notably the lucid Scofield Coriolanus at Stratford in 1962, are still vivid in my brain. What has happened? Somewhere along…
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And now for another installment in my long-running "autobiography by topics." Today's topic is my life as a cook. I say cook, rather than chef, because my kitchen work has always been functional rather that artistic — the very opposite of sophisticated or elegant. I am most definitely not a chef — just a guy…
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For our annual winter stay in New Orleans, we rented a place in the old Bywater district. It's a feature of the neighborhood that one house is a perfect example of classic vernacular architecture while the next one over is a ramshackle mess, smelling of mold and nearly swallowed by yellow cat's paw creeper. And…
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This will be a very short entry, because gambling is not a part of my life. I'm not averse, just uninterested. My brain lacks a gambling gene. I don't bet on sports; I don't participate in office pools; I've never once been to the track. I don't bet on cards because I don't play cards,…
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The first: I dreamt that I received a phone call from my deceased older brother's deceased first wife (who has, by the way, been dead for thirty or more years). She says, very clearly, "______ is dead" (I leave out the name of the person she mentioned because some people are squeamish or superstitious —…
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If there can be a "state of the union" address, and in Colorado a "state of the state," why should we not have a "state of the person" — specifically, the state of this person, i.e. me. An annual report. Today seems like a good day for it — inasmuch as I have just now…