a blind flaneur

Grant Wood. Parson Weem’s’ Fable. 1939. Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth.
When I was five years old, before I learned to read, I laid claim to a book in the family library called Pictorial History of American Presidents. It covered the course from George to  Ike, who still held office then, and it was loaded with […]

Once in a lifetime was something of an anthem for me at a difficult time twenty years ago. In the space of several months, I moved out of the 1820 water mill by the river where I’d lived for a decade; my marriage ended; and my father died. In one cataclysmic swoop, it seemed, I […]

Tired of those hackneyed elephants and donkeys? Hold on, the moose is making a comeback. Not since the days of Teddy Roosevelt has this specie of charismatic mega-fauna received the attention it deserves as a potent political symbol. If you know only two things about Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the Republican Party’s surprise nominee for […]

I’ve listened to warblers countless times over four decades of birding, but I saw only a handful of them. As a kid I was fortunate to learn the warbler songs from two naturalists gifted with perfect pitch. Even then, when I had something like normal vision, seeing warblers was a fleeting,, neck-craning, treetop experience. Once […]

I remember the daisy ad. Anyone alive in 1964 has to remember. What I didn’t realize until the death of its creator, Tony Schwartz, is the fact that it was broadcast as a TV ad only once. After that, it was news. Then it became a legend.
I was nine years old. I wouldn’t admit to […]

Robert F. Kennedy’s moving speech in Indianapolis after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was an extraordinary moment in the history of race in America. The grief of 1968 deepened even further when RFK was shot two months later in Los Angeles. Those senseless killings and the street violence at the Democratic National […]

Robert F. Willis (May 12, 2023 - November 3. 1987). The drawing was made by a Montmartre street artist in 2005 from a photograph taken in Paris after V.E. Day in 1945.
When I was working with my son Saturday I heard my father in my own voice, saying something he would say with surety at […]

When my father died, I knew I would metabolize my grief and honor his memory by being the best father I could be. When my mother died I knew suddenly what it really meant to feel like a motherless child. The path of transformation was not so obvious then. Maybe I am still looking […]

Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]
We set a westerly course midway between Wright Island and shore. I sensed something uneasy about the way Brendan hunched in his life vest. He wasn’t talking.
“Want to go for Hay Bay?” I asked, hoping that an absurd proposition would loosen him up.
“You’re crazy, Dad. Ten miles there, ten miles […]

A clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final words in his last speech, delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the nigt before he was killed.
I walked all night that night forty years ago. I’m still looking for what we lost then, the promise that a change is gonna come.

Sam Cooke’s A Change Is […]