The 50th anniversary of the first public screening of Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws will be celebrated on June 20, 2025. For many, this anniversary will trigger the return of sub-rational fears of swimming in the ocean. For me, I am left thinking about a private lunch I shared with Roy Scheider, who played the police […]
Early in our childhood, and thanks mostly to the iconic Fred Rogers, adults taught us that people make a neighborhood. Midway through the journey of a natural disaster, however, we learn the hard lesson that it is a neighborhood’s trees we commune with in a deeper sense. The cast and angle of light on your […]
An old friend and roommate once identified a phenomenon important to recognize: Crap transference. This is when people give you things they own, apparently with good intentions, except you do not need or want them, and in fact may not have known they existed. Maybe some unused picture frame made them think […]
The dog will be good for days on end, staying within the invisible boundaries of our fenceless yard and reappearing in a reasonable time at the side porch door. Then something snaps inside him, and a minute after I let him out, a black streak fast as a panther cuts a diagonal to […]
I just keep letting my technology fail. Our ancient TV is so blurred, I cannot read the plot summaries from the sofa, and I have to get up anyway, because the remote is not fully functional. My car has gone wonky, so that airbag warnings appear now and then (random, unwarranted) and block […]
June poses something of a lull for the Major League Baseball fan. The excitement of Spring Training and opening day have faded. It is not yet the All-Star break. You can see trends and contenders developing, but every pennant is still up for grabs and the various leaderboards will be disrupted […]
The hazards of communicating by email are well known: the precision of word choice matters when the tone of voice is absent. This is why the emojis that accompany phone texts are so vital. Emojis crown our messages with a tone marked by whatever yellow-headed expression we choose. But for true understanding […]
People are hard to know; meaning comes dear. I was out walking the trail. A bridge that was being demolished blocked my usual route, so I headed in the opposite direction, toward what might as well have been a foreign town, though it was just a few miles away. Humidity was back […]
On Friday, May 16, the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s crews were hammering away in the glen, preparing the set for the following week’s tech rehearsals. Phones buzzed a warning just in time for people to take cover. A minute later, gale-force wind whipped through the glen and knocked all their work asunder. Tom […]
When someone in my book club chose Their Eyes Were Watching God as our next book, I was startled. I had not thought of that novel since grad school. But I dove back in, through the thicket of phonetic dialogue that today would be verboten, and found Janie all over again. Talk about […]