Writing is Remembering
(Cucurbita pepo var. giromontina). Found in Berzi near Bauska city, Latvia. Sanja565658 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). Over forty years ago, I became a vegetarian. I was a philosophy graduate student at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Not, in all of the time since, did I become familiar with the term "vegetable marrow." Recently, however, I … Continue reading “I Cultivate the Marrows”
Robert Frost's home in Shaftsbury, VT.Photo by Beth Ben-Avraham, ©2020 All Rights Reserved. Have you ever admired a person and then learned about something they said or did, or didn't say or didn't do, that caused you to examine your feelings about them? It's happened to me on more than one occasion. Often, quite often, … Continue reading Weak Creatures of Clay
Walkeshwar Temple, Malabar Hill, Mumbai, 1860. Photographer unknown. Public domain. A few days ago, I was putting away my second set of tefillin, when I dropped the one worn on my arm. It was in its protective case and landed upright undamaged on the floor. A friend picked it up and handed it to me. … Continue reading The Element of the Sacred
Cincinnatus Receiving Deputies of the Senate. By Alexandre Cabanel, 1843. Beginning in the ninth grade, I took Latin each year in school until I graduated from high school, a total of four years. Apart from my classes in English, Latin was the single most influential subject I learned before college. I'm grateful to have had … Continue reading For Every Crooked Politician
"Venice. The city of mirrors, the city of mirages." Photo by Vlad Hilitanu, Unsplash. I own an edition of The Harvard Classics. One of the frustrating things about it is the process I have to follow to locate something I want to read. All the books have the same front cover; the back covers are blank; … Continue reading Books, Covers, and Masks
Rydal Mount - home of the poet William WordsworthPhoto by Neil Parley CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0). One summer, while vacationing in New Brunswick, Canada, I took a ferry from the mainland to Deer Island, a small island in the Bay of Fundy. While searching for a picnic spot, I passed a bookshop advertising old books … Continue reading How to Count Family
Breakfast in the Loggia. John Singer Sargent. Date: 1910. I know a woman who spent her summers growing up in a small town on the coast of Maine. One day, in the town’s library, she noticed a row of books atop one of the bookshelves. The books attracted her attention; they were classics, dust-covered, and … Continue reading How Frail I Am
"Odysseus in the Cave of Polyphemus" by Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678). Charles Darwin is fascinating to read, from many viewpoints. There is, of course, the obvious one—the scientific one. He is a keen observer. We marvel at the meticulous details he records about botany, geology, marine biology, and zoology, for instance. It’s impossible, though, not to … Continue reading With Darwin’s Eyes and Ears
Photo by Chris Child, unsplash.com. It was lovely out in the country. Summer had come; the wheat in the fields was golden, the oats were still green, and the new-mown hay had been built into haystacks in the meadow, where the storks walked around on their long red legs talking to each other in Egyptian.The … Continue reading He Had Grown into a Swan
Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick, Canada. Photo by the author, 2019. For more than thirty years, I spent at least part of almost every summer in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. I would stay at a log cabin overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay, about ten miles from the town of St. Andrews. When I was still at … Continue reading Three Things There Are
