Extinction is a big word.
A love story
I’ve seen no one get in their 10,000 steps inside of ten square feet. But there he was, this gentleman in his seventies, who wore experience like vintage Italian leather.
Odysseus. What a curious name for a lunar lander. I get that odysseys are a spacecraft’s stock-in-trade, but Odysseus is famously known for getting lost on his way back to Ithaca from Troy, and needing 10 years to make it home.
The Trojans never stood a chance. It wasn’t guile and deceit that won the Greeks the war. It was attrition.
Last night, we slept by the light of the super blue moon.
A few nights ago, Maria and I resolved to have the Beegie Adair Trio accompany our grilled mango and jalapeño sausages.
My copy of Seneca’s Letters From a Stoic has been protecting my worktable from mugs of hot coffee or tea for years.
At some point, we came to the ford in the river and fell out of touch with what it means to be an adult.
Sorry, Sam, a kiss is more than just lip syncing.
When the kids were growing up, my favourite time of day was suppertime. You could always count on it rolling in as the sun bowed out. If you missed it, you did so voluntarily. Because making time for supper is a conscious choice.
Christmas traditions are meant to evolve, otherwise they’re history.
I should have known by my third Cinzano a power failure was going to be my only hope of ducking out of dancing. I’m not proud of it, but I’d have been equally fine with an earthquake or an alien invasion.
Bucolic, yes, but in a cosmic way.
We buried kindness today. Not all of it, but one of its quiet shining lights.
As parents, we all go through that spell when our kids feel they know everything, and realize you don’t. You’ve been laid bare, defrocked of your cape, stripped of your superpowers.
I grew up believing fig trees were the frailest of all fruit-bearing plants. We had two, which my dad and I overwintered into the ground every fall. I thought them cowards for not standing up to our cold Canadian climate, and I resented the trench-digging, tree-bending, back-breaking inconvenience they put us through for the handful of figs they yielded every year.
I was too young and New World to recognize we weren’t cultivating these trees to reap a bountiful harvest, for one solitary late-August fig sufficed to gift my parents a taste of home.
I can count on my barber’s door always being open. If only because it doesn’t close properly.
The shores that launched a thousand ships.
Flying is an act of humility; ingenuity without overreach; the quiet dependability of Pegasus above the irreverent hubris of Icarus.
It’s Easter morning, and I’m reminded of my father’s skin. He had terrific skin, the kind that could sink the skincare industry.
At the turn of the 20th century, a Belfast grammar school head teacher named John Jackson argued that with training, we could educate ourselves to write a letter with one hand, while playing the piano with the other, without affecting our ability to concentrate. The result would be “a brave new world of two-handed, two-brained citizens.” So I ask myself, what happened to my other brain?
When you’re an only child, sometimes the arc of creativity bends toward mischief.
For the sound of the page within.