Clarity in Uncertainty

The wind blew the fog in off the lake in thick sheets. In what seemed like only a few minutes on the running trail, the early morning sun and blue skies abandoned me to a curtain of mist. It reminded me of driving in winter weather coming up against nasty pockets of snow and sleet, …

Burnin For You

Each envelope was like getting a singular piece of plunder from a pirate’s chest. Inside, a CD of live music, booted and burned from a concert at some exotic sounding venue like The Grotto, The M-Stop, or The Gem Theater. Christmas in your mailbox. Before music was uploaded into our consciousness or etched onto a …

Left Turn Life

Walter could have been a painter. His father was a fairly well-known painter in Philadelphia. Walter studied painting at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He traveled in Europe, draining Italy of its inspiration. A style that started out as representational morphed into abstraction. In Italy he worked with an unusual technique involving …

When We Stood Still

My brother is the space nerd in the family. Months in advance of our one family trip to the mecca of all family vacation places—Disney World: where dreams come true!—he puts in his request to visit the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. This is his boy version of getting pulled up on stage …

Stay Strong, Stay Soft

I wonder how it felt. I wonder if he really registered the heft of the rock in his hand before he hurled it or if his mind was already watching a different movie play out—the one where he bragged to his friends about what he’d done as they passed around a bottle of beer and …

Gather Good Stuff

Hey America, how are you doing this week? Maybe not so great. Maybe feeling a little, I don’t know, anxious? Perhaps you’ve been startling awake at night clutching your midsection that throbs with some kind of thudding ache, the kind that is only one of two things: existential dread or an ill-fated decision to get …

The Fuller Cup

The two cafes faced each other like wild west gunslingers: The Fuller Cup and Starbucks. Scarcely twenty paces from one another, the cafes occupied space on a side street just off the main square of Winchester—a quaint, affluent town less than ten miles from Boston. The tiny downtown section unspools in a series of rotaries …