As a wedding gift, Grandma Spratt gave my parents a cat from a litter born in her backyard. He was black except for a white stripe on his chest, and Mum and Dad named him Monty. They said that when I was born two years later, they’d worried they’d
Memoir
Moral Compass
1 The subject that afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Slater, told us, would be how to play chess. "Chess is about checkmate, about trapping your opponent’s king,” he said from the front of the classroom. “It isn't about taking pieces. Only mediocre
Lines from Experience: Twelve More Poems
This is the fourth collection of poems I’ve recently posted. All poems surely come from experience, but usually not in any obvious way. Each of these has a connection with a specific moment or time. Once again, the dates are those of original
Crossings: Eight Poems
Here are eight poems I wrote between 1974 and 1981. Unlike the poems in the two part-series I published a couple of weeks ago, which had never seen the light of day, I shared these with friends and others, and I revised them from time to time. They
A Lexicon of Character Formation
Mimicry is one of the many skills I don’t possess. Even so, the people I’ve known over the course of my life have made their mark on me, and I hear it in the expressions I’ve co-opted from them. I’ll always recall from my childhood with affection
MRI
Originally posted June 22, 2017. Last week I had an MRI, not my first. Familiarity takes some of the edge off my anxiety about it, but it still runs like a current through the weeks and days. All too soon, I’m in a dressing room at the MRI