Easy is Hard

Always seems weird to me that my bank’s ATM machine can read messy hand-written checks just fine, but can’t read the amount of a perfectly clear machine printed check.  But then there are are easy things that I can’t do and I can do some difficult things.

Yellow Paint

Life is imperfect, but on this day the yellow paint on the parking lot, painted to suggest you not park and block the white door in the white wall, gets a little close to perfection, if you ignore how the last diagonal stripe ends too soon near the door.

Pancakes and Play Writing

While cooking pancakes I had one of them profound thoughts that I needed to document and share… Occurred to me that there might be a notable parallel between cooking pancakes and writing plays, at least a two-act plays. When cooking a pancake you have to pour in the right amount of batter at the right […]

Thoughts for Buffalo

Here is a thought for my family and friends in Buffalo that are shaking their heads in disbelief that the Bills have once again been knocked off. I was once a desperately devoted Red Sox fan, starting in about 1971. I lived and died with them every season. The absolute worst was 1986 when, in […]

A Good Fall

Yesterday, going down the stairs to my basement, I fell. My shoes were wet and slippery and my feet went out from under me. I hit the stairs pretty hard, on my back. My first thought was… this is the beginning of the end: broken pelvis, long hospital stay, declining health in all aspects. But […]

Dove’s Wisdom

I have a bird feeder outside my office window so I, and Daisy the cat, can watch the birds from close up. I only feed them in the colder seasons because in summer the crowds of summer birds will empty the feeder in an hour. So the rule is that I start the feeding up […]

Graduation

I photographed a number of college graduation events this week and this is an abstracted image from one of them. Graduation is a big deal, a distinct dividing point between phases of life. For me, it always came with mixed feelings: a feeling of accomplishment but more of uncertainty about what comes next. College is […]

The Commitment of World War II

There is a museum in Catania, Sicily, about the Allied invasion of Italy, which began in Sicily. The museum is quite remarkable, including a bomb shelter where you sit and listen to sound of bombs dropping while the room shakes. There are endless exhibits about all aspects of that invasion, including guns of all sizes, […]

A Seagull Can Fly

Walking along a seawall there is a nervous and clumsy seagull ahead of me. It is waddling along, glancing back at me.  And then, deciding What The Heck, it just steps off the wall, opens its wings and soars into the wind over the sea. It is transformed from an awkward earthling to a graceful […]

Carrot Shopping

Once again, a routine visit to the supermarket becomes a little voyage of scenes and scenarios. On the way in, a mother has placer her child in her shopping cart, a site I always strikes me as cute and I am tempted to ask in which aisle did she find such a lovely child? This […]