Newsletter

Night before last, carbon payback for daring this kind of air voyage: after a five hour drive and a five hour connecting flight, a two hour layover, and three immobile hours on the tarmac we're informed something doesn't work, and at 2 a.m. we're off the plane, wandering aimless in an empty San Francisco...

I've been a pulmonary refugee for some time, and have been obliged to join the geese and the butterflies and head to less acute climes when the native cold comes on. It's probably extended my days. I was ongoingly grateful for the respite, and uneasy about the clear disfigurement of the locale that mass migration of...

There are marvelous things about being on the road. There are the reminders that the world's a big place, that humans are a disparate lot, that life's not long, that you're often older than you think you are, that being right is more a coincidence than a plan, that being in the right place...

When the end of my thirties loomed my mother play-glared at me on the eve of my birthday and half declared and half prayed as follows: "I don't have a forty year old son!" She did, though. And the current odometer would gall her still: she has a son who's all but seventy. Someone sent me...

If you're in the mood for meme-length considerations, I'd move on if I were you. This is likely to be lengthy. It'll cover some ground. In the lobby after last night's show a man outwaited all the other patrons to offer me dramaturgical advice, to wit: the end of the festivities should not leave the paying...

It's called 'a world tour', this thing of ours. Grand-sounding. Over the top for Canadians to say about themselves. And there isn't much agreement about the scale or range that makes up a 'world' jaunt. One thing's more certain than not, though: small places don't usually qualify for world tour inclusion. If you're on...

Some days stagger to their conclusion. We're far from home, in someone else's land, holding out for a kindly reception for our heart's labours. The morning's day off has been spent not touring the haunts of my Harvard days, but in a hotel foyer, waiting on the repair of the rental van's flat tire,...

Torrid Tucson night   The second act of your three act play - if you get one - is there for you to find those with whom you'll live out the reasons for your birth and your persistence up unto the present moment. It's outrageous good fortune just to get one. It marks you for keeps...

I know - or I'm fairly sure, and that's as close to 'know' as the circuitry of being modern and home-seeking and confused by freedom allows - that there are people out beyond my ken who receive, and sometimes read, and sometimes consider these things I compose and send. I know there's a daily...

It's a delicate business, this boycotting. The best of people wants justice to prevail, starting anytime. Starting last week. Starting now. Good will: we could start there. But good will is a complicating business. Boycotting a country is a bit like taking the hippocratic oath: maybe, if you withhold your little something, maybe nothing bad...