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,…
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,…
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…
I’ve always believed Uncle Bob grew up at a half-address, although I can’t prove this is so. The one time I visited his childhood home, when I was 8 and he was 41, the smallness and secret feel of the tiny bungalow in Inglewood had that half-address mystery. His yard as I recall it was…
In my mid-twenties, still living in Redondo, I met my wife and imagine my odd pleasure as I visit her home for the first time to find that she lives in an apartment in the village. A comforting familiarity lifts me along the narrow stairs of faux-marble cast concrete rising through the dark stuccoed tunnel…
The cooking that was truly sacramental for father was southern fare, the food of his grandmothers, his mother and the ladies who had cooked for them over the years. His father’s mother had run a stage stop and inn, while his maternal grandmother was a judge’s wife who kept a grand, crow-stepped manse in the…
This Virginia language was one of apparent sweetness, humor, courtliness, and loving repetition – yes sir being the characteristic all-purpose note that signaled the small welcome surprise at the world’s fleeting manifold, as in yes sir, daddy’s Packard, or yes sir, Gene Tierney – a way of briefly holding something pleasing up to the light.…