Time: The Doppler Effect
I’m still debriefing from the West Virginia trip that began almost two weeks ago. It was an anticipated event I watched on the calendar as it came closer and closer. It was briefly time under my own feet in the…
Category Aging
Young Blood and The Thread of Life
Things come in threes and when they do, I start to see shapes in the clouds. Creativity, after all, is putting together what already exists–often in some other person’s work or thoughts or writings–in novel ways to make them your…
Never Forever
The way things are can take on illusion of permanence. All permanence within nature is a fiction. I remember as a very young man lying on my back in the cool shade of a sandstone ledge , its massive brow…
Vicarious Vitality: Watching Them Run
Yes, we have two grand daughters, and it is only because the older one had a NIGHT game that she has not been featured in this back to back g-dau series. The take-home from watching the energy expended on the…
Skin Stats and Stitches
I grew up southern. Our summers started in March and our clothes came off as the temps stayed high for the next 9 months. I worked shirtless for summer jobs that included life-guarding at a summer girl’s camp. I fished…
The VBR
This week we’ve been excavating the Very Back Room. It is the kind of task that has a beginning, but once breached, it gushes decisions and piles and pools of anguish of seemingly endless volume. I wrote some thoughts about…
Climbing Cardiac Mountain
Click the first image to open the gallery browser, then click the arrow >> to move forward and back. Just three images, so not much of a gallery. We figure as long as we can make it to the top…
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Buying that first wood stove in 1975 was a pragmatic decision–an option we really could not refuse. Fuel oil was 17 cents a gallon. Our first monthly bill in the old house on Withers Road in Wytheville was 300-something dollars…
The Very Small Child in the Very Perfect Storm
If I had a grandfather from either parent (alas, I did not) to hold me on his knee as a toddler sixty-some years ago, he would have held such hope for me. He would have known such pleasure to imagine…
Hands Down, Dragon Dictates
Two years ago, I decided to end a decade of pain that visited me before I ever typed enough keystrokes to complete a blog post, email, twitter update or essay. I agreed to see a hand specialist for what is…
Facing Retirement: Part Two
Here, a second excerpt from Aging Through the Lens of Time from my second book, What We Hold In Our Hands: a Slow Road Reader. I am thinking and writing elsewhere about the role that photography has played in my…
Facing Retirement: Time Has Come
Not for the faint of heart: Face Retirement And someone my age should probably refrain. If you think the bags and dark eye circles and creases could not get worse, don’t kid yourself. But if you’re curious, Dorians and Doriannas,…
Unilateral withdrawal
… But hoping for bilateral re-entry again by Christmas time. Thinking back to the surgery on the left hand a year ago April: at least for the first several days, I’ll have to keep my arm elevated to shoulder height…
Obsolete Children
Dr. Seuss published You’re Only Old Once in 1986, on his 82nd birthday. At the time, due to illness, he complained of having a social life consisting entirely of doctors. You can see and feel his amused disdain throughout the…