Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.
How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to [...]

Helen was always good at nest-building, as I recall.
This came in handy, because as I once figured out, we went through over 40 moves before I graduated from high school. Many of those were within the same community, of course. Arriving in Abilene, Texas for instance, we lived for a time in a motel with [...]

I hardly know how to begin, but I have to try, in order to save myself.
Those of you who have gone through something similar will understand at least a little, or maybe a lot. We’re all the same and yet so different. It’s one thing to say, “My mother has been diagnosed with advanced [...]

Thanks to everyone who’s left a message or sent me one!
Yes, it’s here, the actual calendar anniversary of my birth long ago in the wartime summer of 1945 in Bryan, Texas, YE GODS!!! And here’s a picture of me (look hard) with my mother, pretty young Helen Masson from Middle River, MD, taken [...]

Probably only Leos broadcast their birthdays in advance. No, not to get presents or put on airs — Leos don’t have to — but because they feel free to do so. It’s natural. The last thing my wife would do, or would have done even many years ago, is talk up her birthday, except privately [...]

That’s what she called him, “Lumpy.”
For the two or three people in the whole world who might understand what I’m talking about, that’s what yet another Maryland friend emailed me when I told her who had died on Wednesday. I didn’t even know he had a nickname, but then she might have gone to [...]

Exhibit A: a photograph of me in Maryland from 1977. A very fine photographer friend of mine was cleaning out his archives and sent me this while I was in Santa Fe having fish & chips with the women in the previous post. I already knew one of them when Ed took that picture, and [...]

I hadn’t seen her in about eight years, or was it nine?
There was some nervousness on my part at first, having to do with simply meeting someone from our old life. It wasn’t me or her I was concerned with, however, but my wife. At least I thought it had to do with her. As [...]

Oh man, Bo Diddley died today, and I’m sitting here with tears running down my face. What joy that man brought into this world. I finally got to hear him play in Santa Fe, back in January of ‘04, and wrote about it in one of my old GRACK! columns that I later developed into [...]

I want to write about the heart. I can’t possibly finish this in a blog post, but I want to start.
Today I know that now, right now, is the beginning of the rest of my life, on which there are no limits. The “secret” is being true to myself, the fact of which I’m [...]