Justin is gone; he went downriver to hang with the family. Yesterday was a luminous day-- no rain, but we were shielded from the sun most of the day. We spent hours on the water, then came home for filet mignon with friends, followed by a long walk in… Read full post »

The years were unkind to the Fast Trike, but they only ate it slowly.  It had belonged to my grandfather, and it struck me one day, while I was scrubbing off the rust, that it was about fifty-five years old, which is to say, not very much… Read full post »

My benighted brother recently became a pastor.  He was doing a good thing, in some ways.  The gig doesn't make him a cent and uses up an inordinate (pardon the pun) amount of his time, but he took it on for noble reasons.

It's national coming out day, and it made me… Read full post »

I am not convinced that the Peace Prize has to do, in the end, with a summation of life achievement regarding the goal of peace. It seems to have more to do with specific points in a life. Gandhi excepted, perhaps. An example:

Poor Arafat! The kings of the earth trotted the… Read full post »

The paragon of animals is still without a clue;
In this regard, there isn't an exception just for you.

Our ego is a wondrous thing, but though it’s hardly blind,
It often can't perceive what's not already in the mind:

Projected apperceptions form a filter that we use;
By analogy with the way we feel… Read full post »

A law student is trained to be able to think in a particular way, a legal mode of reasoning.  She approaches a piece of news differently, teasing it open, as it were, to behold the nub.  It’s not an absolute, true nub— nothing spiritual or ultimate— but the core of its… Read full post »

It's story time. Let me tell you about insurance companies.

The doctor who headed up our mission teams in the sugar fields of the Dominican Republic, an estimable man, keeps a house in Surrey. That house had a slate roof, and it was failing. Slates were sliding/… Read full post »

    What’s important for journalism is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality.
    — Bill Moyers, in Moyers on America

    People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in… Read full post »

Thank you, Jack.  I'd like to address the notion that we can't afford this school budget.  

While I was waiting to come to this meeting I was reading.  Thucydides wrote a great account of the history of his city as it unfolded in his lifetime.  When I put the book down… Read full post »

The attitude you're flirting with here, Ian, my brother, is cynicism. What you list in this rant are truths, relatively; I don't deny it. We are all a bunch of dumb house apes who can't get out of our own way very effectively.

Abysmal acts of rapine and callous slaughter are… Read full post »

Link to Part Two

It was nobody’s ideal site, entirely rough. We had to dig through the duff to mineral soil to make a firepit, and we had seedlings and ferns to clear from the tent spaces. But there was room for five or six tents with a… Read full post »

Beaver lodges both old and currently occupied appeared at frequent intervals. In the water at the margin stood pickerelweed with its spikes of purple flowers, the succulent stem always knee deep in swamp water, and clusters of dark straight triangular reeds a meter high, some with a… Read full post »

Just for reference: The last syllable of Passadumkeag is pronounced like the beer container, but the accent falls on 'dum.' Nicatous is pronounced Nick a Tawas. I feel a little guilty giving away one of our Maine shibboleths, but there it is, accent on Tau (like the first syllable of the… Read full post »

 A mother's load is weighty though she live until she's eighty.

So said Churchy LaFemme when Howland exclaimed he'd struck the motherlode.  Walt Kelly, one of the twentieth century's immortals, is especially cogent on the subject of malarkey, and there's a lot of malarkey out… Read full post »

I gave the matter some thought.

The opposition snipes at whatever the new administration does or sets in train to be done.  They are waiting for a flub, a screwup, a misstep, so they can say they told us so, Obama's naïve, Obama's incompetent.  Some people figure the progressives, jus… Read full post »

The following is an e-mail from the year of the hurricane (Georges) which had hit the island pretty hard, at the expense mostly of roofs and standing crops.

The R. D. is the east half of the same island with Haiti, of course.  Although we moved about in it, we were there… Read full post »

This is in response, in particular, to an OS blog:

 norman kelley, in April

Torture is certainly not an exclusively George Bush product.  I was a Freedom Writer for some years for Amnesty International.  We wrote letters to ask redress for many kinds of human rights abuses, not just to… Read full post »

This is posted in response to an OS blog:

http://open.salon.com/blog/kenmi1/2009/04/29/how_could_i_be_late_again

 Bird Skulls

Lately
Skulls of birds haunt my dreams
I opened a drawer a drawer like any other
I had cut my finger again
It was brimful of the skulls of crows
I h… Read full post »

My daughter told me we had chosen an admirable day. Radio weather priests had descried it: the wind wouldn't exceed 5 to 10 miles per hour, so our paddle would be calm and benign. She told this to every member of our party. All the wind had to do was hold… Read full post »