Category Personal
DLIWC
In November of 1968, after six weeks of Air Force Basic Training, I was sent to the Defense Language Institute, West Coast branch, at the Presidio of Monterey. There I would study Serbo-Croatian. DLIWC, a.k.a. “dilly-wick,” was a mystery to me, but I was so grateful to be leaving Basic, I gave no thought to […]
The Nutcracker
December 2000 Last night Laurie and Abbie and I went into Syracuse to see “The Nutcracker” and have an early dinner at The Blue Tusk. As is traditional before ballet, I had a liverwurst sandwich with a bag of chips. Tim, the owner, treated me to a pint of Rogue Yellow Snow Ale, a holiday […]
The Hawk Letter
An incident in 1988, embellished with a new introduction in 2002. Our backyard on Crawford Avenue in Syracuse was lovely, but it was never the Garden of Eden, nor was it the Peaceable Kingdom. On one occasion, Laurie watched a cheeky sparrow take a sunflower seed from a chipmunk, who grabbed the sparrow and dragged […]
How to Make a Stone Chess Board
I am not the handiest person, but I like to putter around, and recently, while thinking about slate roofs, I got an idea for a chess board made with slate squares. I couldn’t find any stone squares of the right size on the Web, but while wandering around Lowe’s, I stumbled into the tile department […]
Friends and Mail Boxes
Given my passion for the post office, it’s no surprise that I love mail boxes as well. I especially love pictures of mail boxes and friends. The one that started it all, a photo of artist Theo Tilton next to a giant mail box in Louisiana. Roland Sweet notes, “In the fall of 1986, Theo […]
The Stone Tower of Silas Paine
It would be inappropriate to tell you why I was so afraid and so angry, but I was, rocking from the one emotion to the other like a boat tilting and rolling on the waves of Lake George, where I was supposed to be on vacation in July of 2004. By the third day, the […]
Uncle Lee’s Bed
It was the tallest, highest bed in the world, I think, where I spent every Christmas Eve as a boy. For the holiday, we traveled from Buffalo to Salamanca, N.Y., to the home of my grandparents on Academy Street. My brother, who was older, got to spend the night with our cousins over at their […]
The Daddy Who Could Not Talk
In 1986, my friend Cheri Bladholm, an illustrator, called with a question. A publisher wanted to see what she could do with a story. It could be any story, just not one they’d seen a hundred times before. Did I know an obscure fairy tale that hadn’t already been illustrated many times? I didn’t, but […]
Camp Becket
July 21, 2006 When I was a boy, my parents were avid square dancers, members of The Promenaders in Kenmore, N.Y. They owned square dance finery. Mom had skirts with multiple petticoats and Dad had silver points on his collars, and bolo ties, and pearly buttons on Western shirts. They danced on the weekend and […]
Father Klauder
I was raised as a Baptist, in a house across the street from a Roman Catholic church. Every day I marveled at the Catholics I saw, how different they were. The Baptist faith of my youth was cut from plain cloth, with simple rules: Everything I did or thought of doing was wrong, and I […]
Faithful Readers 