“O, GOD, THY SEA IS SO GREAT AND MY BOAT IS SO SMALL”

– Breton Fisherman’s Prayer

I want a painting that portrays this. Big ocean. Dramatic clouds. Swirling colors of joy and despair. Small boat. I ran across this prayer in some book, and I keep running across it. Apparently JFK had a plaque […]

Or, close to one sitting. I don’t think I have ever staved off my bladder or appetite for an entire book. Maybe what I mean is several sittings in one day. I believe that there is a book for everyone that if you found it you would sit down and read it in one sitting. […]

George Orwell said unflattering things about the word utilize. The use of utilize says to me that 1.) the writer has not read and reread Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” and that 2.) they didn’t read and reread their paper at the sentence level to consider each word. I think the word use […]

The funniest thing I have ever done was shake a half-full water bottle. This was my son’s first laugh. For a few weeks this was the funniest thing in his world. I tried this in front of a class full of seniors, and they didn’t laugh at all. Peek-a-Boo works because the recipient of the […]

Unfinished song by John  + unfinished song by Paul + multiple instrumental and tonal changes + a lingering last note = “A Day In the Life” by the Beatles.

I love this song. It’s the last song on the Sgt. Pepper’s Album. It’s downright cute to read that references to smoking, dreaming, and lines […]

Pine cones are tiny sculptures. They are solid, more permanent than flowers, and will be intact much longer than most people’s relationships. And like relationships, and people, and snowflakes, they are so individually different, even among cones of the same species. Compare a Doug Fir cone to a Sugar Pine or a Sequoia or Redwood […]

You’ve seen this in a sitcom, or a movie, or both. Girl (usually the boy takes the backseat in the plot here) thinks she’s pregnant, but wasn’t planning it, and so now she’s forced to think through life with or without a kid. Often the connection (or lack of one) to the father is involved […]

Teenagers are like caffeine, alcohol, chocolate, cute little puppies, and the old prank of putting a bag of dog poop on someone’s front porch and lighting it on fire. It’s a joy and burden to spend my weeks among them. They are funny and inspiring, and they are also a sticky, smelly, inappropriate mess. If […]

The spork is similar to fruitcake. It’s a combination of things that are good, popular, well-liked, and yet the combination gets a bad rap.

Quality varies with sporks and fruitcakes. I like them both, primarily, as ideas.

Often we think of the bad examples first. For the spork, this means those flimsy ones wrapped in plastic […]