I’d have a rental car and drive through places seeing what would catch my eye, park, jump out, set up the tripod, and take the picture. In Redondo, a sense of being on home ground and the proprietary feel that accompanied it shielded me from paralyzing self-consciousness, but in other locales the long-seeming ritual of…
Mother had cause for her lack of enthusiasm about war, having lost her first husband while he was stationed with the Army Air Corp in Sardinia, attached to a bomber squadron of B-26s. They had married in the fall of 1943 at Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana; he shipped out a month later and died…
This week I went to a seminar in Chico about how to get published. In the back room of a local bookstore, twenty or so of us sat around a conference table while Dan, our teacher and facilitator, spoke to us about self-publishing. As if to confirm that those younger than 50 have already figured…
My working life began in places like half-addresses, gardening, clipping, pulling dead jacaranda leaves from a kidney shaped planter box edged in brick along a stuccoed garage wall under a cooling gray while my transistor radio quietly played its endless rotation of Top Forty singles. Other high school friends actually had to meet the public,…
I liked to think of Aunt Nancy’s musical gift pausing for a generation in one of her female forebears along the New River – they’d been there since before the revolution – a little girl in the 1830s perhaps, in a butternut shift and bonnet pattering along a trail at the top of Doe Run…
A certain eccentricity ran among the three closest sisters of my grandmother’s family, Nell, Sue and Evelyn, and quirky stories followed each of them through their lives. In her one room school in the 1890s, on the Illinois prairie, Nell developed a taste for mischief and a discerning eye for the absurd. She enjoyed watching…
The early 1970s, my Volkswagen fogged with pot smoke, I drive to the revival houses thriving around LA, the Fox Venice, the Nuart, the Beverly. In these years, inside the fading movie palaces crowds of similarly stoned young film buffs sit in the dark like dim phototropic plants, heads moving to the big glowing images,…
For a wild place, Buffalo had many soothing beauties. In the mid-1920s, after they had left the homestead and moved into town for good, in the summer evenings the family would drive in the car up Fort Road along Clear Creek. At one turn-in, you could park and look down on the water where Crow…
One day in March of 1944, at 2626 P Street in Lincoln, Nebraska, Mother sat by the dining room door next to the radio, laughing along with her cousins and then in conversation with her Aunt Imo so that she didn’t see the car from Western Union pull up to the curb and the still-faced…
Tuesday nights in Redondo Mother goes out to eat at the Brewery, a nice two-story bar-bistro in the Riviera Village, only a block from our old apartment – in fact, from the second floor, one can just see the black roofline of the apartment building itself among the jumbled gloom at the bottom of the…