My father was some kind of sandwich genius. In fact, he was remarkably intelligent in many ways, even brilliant, some would say. A Presbyterian minister by training, he was a ruthless and determined chess player. He read more books in a month than I read in a year—and he remembered them in uncanny detail. And when … Continue reading The Power of Peanut Butter
There’s just something about incense. I realize that may sound strange from a middle-age man who is neither a Reiki practitioner, nor a musician, nor a Tarot card reader. I’m not even sure when I started appreciating a thick haze of aloeswood in my study. Incense, with its evocative fragrances, has the power to call … Continue reading What Life Smells Like These Days
I had spent most of the morning working on my novel, living inside the bell jar of my own, strange imagination. At some point, I went to fetch my phone from the family room. As I did, I spotted an airy tuft of cat fur on the hardwood floor, just lallygagging there like a tiny … Continue reading Glitter Glue and Just Slowing Down
It turns out I have a dangerous temper. Dangerous to my identity as a civilized being, not to anyone else. I would have expected to reach this epiphany much earlier in life, but that’s the nature of epiphanies—they slowly form in the caverns of our subconscious and then, one day, when we’re slicing carrots or … Continue reading Fightin’ Words
Despite those moments of stillness when I notice, almost accidentally, the slow sway of the fir branch, or the gray spider moving along the windowsill, life most often feels like a headlong sprint. When we’re young, time’s advance doesn’t trouble us: It carries us reassuringly toward maturity—meeting that girl at the football game, getting a … Continue reading Defiant Spaces
Masculinity is a freighted word. I can’t conjure those five syllables without calling to mind certain classic images of maleness. It’s like there’s a memory chip in my brain that serves up the same old picture, even when I change the search terms. The same phenomenon is true, I think, for all kinds of deep-seated … Continue reading What Masculinity Looked Like
You may have noticed I've been a little distant lately. It's not for lack of caring, I promise. It's odd. We've both stayed put but we don't connect like we used to. Sometimes I see you from a distance and it reminds me how long it's been since we spent time together. I get this … Continue reading It’s Not You—It’s That Hip Injury
It had been more than six months since we’d seen this couple. My wife had been teaching abroad for a semester and during her absence I didn't go out much. Now that Barbara was back in the States, though, our social calendar was repopulated with evenings out like this one. We met at a favorite … Continue reading Rethinking the Whole Manhood Thing
If you haven’t heard about CBD (cannabidiol, one of 113 “cannabinoids” found in Cannabis plants) you’re not spending much time online. As for me, I was fairly late to the party, having heard about CBD a while ago but filed it away in my pseudoscience dustbin. As with many things in life, though, I wrote … Continue reading CBD, Prostate Cancer, and Just Carrying On
Graduate school gave me mixed signals about intelligence. Every now and then I try to sort them out. Thirty-five years after I earned my master’s degree from the University of Virginia, the nature of my own intellect remains unclear to me. For a long time, I wondered just what kind of "intelligent" I might be—and … Continue reading An Unbearable Brightness of Being
