Farewell to Daylight Savings.

And good riddance I might ad; a thorn in my side has past. Daylight savings is the enemy of the unwilling early riser, stealing away the dawn in those desperate early days of spring and bringing hours of morning darkness in the fall. Usually today is a happy one for me, but today started with dog…

The Other Mind

To get a nut on a bolt is a pedestrian task, the sort of thing that happens all the time. But when the bolt can not be seen, sticks out at a weird angle and requires a stack of washers, say a grounding brass, wide steel and a lock washer held in place while the nut…

When a Bear is your neighbor.

  I sit on a rumbling island of steel enwrapped in clouds. Work is slow and my mind wanders to projects at home: getting the woodstove done finally, making a cider press that works and won’t try and electrocute me and what exactly is that smell in the living room? Hopefully a mouse. Outside the…

The Scattered Mind

I have worn glasses since age seven; my first Optician, a kind and gentle man who made his own lenses by hand in a narrow windowless shop on Jay Street in Schenectady told me that the advantage of being so near-sighted was that I would never need reading glasses. Of the old school Dr. Lapidus always…

Aging Without Grace

One part of aging is watching yourself become the things you once disdained. The other part is this realization, which would have horrified me in my thirties, simply amuses me at fifty. Back in the day, so to speak, I rode a silver Cannondale road bike but eschewed “roadie” culture: no lycra, padded shorts, team…

Know Thyself

  In the summer of 1992, after college, as I considered what course to take in the world, my mother suggested the law. I might have considered it more thoroughly at the time had she not followed it with; “You could be a judge, maybe even sit on the Supreme Court!”. She always had delusions…

My Daughters

Are not fodder for you masculinity, They are God’s light on earth; future mothers and builders of this world. My sons are not grist for your mills of war, They are the future fathers and teachers, husbands and partners of a world beyond our imagination. So many who claim to love God, Cannot love their…