Merry Christmas, friends
Archive of posts filed under the family category.
White Christmas
The sun is shining, the grass is green The orange and palm trees sway There’s never been such a day In Beverly Hills, LA But it’s December the 24th And I’m longing to be up north – Irving Berlin The backyard of my childhood home, in the foothills above Upland, California, was a remnant of …
“Am I gonna get to read it?”
A seven word sentence – eight if you think “gonna” should count for two. It is my measure of my mother, the number of words she can string together into a sentence without break. The sentence does not have to make sense to me to count. It merely has to have an internal grammatical coherence, …
The centennial of the National Park Service
On its centennial, there is no question in my mind about the central role of the U.S. National Park Service in my life’s trajectory. I’ve written often about my experience as a young boy, standing on the Grand Canyon’s south rim, wandering the view spots craning my neck for those fragmentary vistas where you can …
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some thoughts on my rainbow unicorn socks
Some years ago, my adult child gave me a pair of rainbow unicorn socks. They’re really nice, comfy socks, but in a complicated way. They are quite literally comfy – thin and stretchy, made of a high quality fabric. More than that, the rainbows and the unicorns are for me an assertion of comfort in …
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The GI Bill and the history of American art
Surely some art historian has puzzled through the impact of the GI Bill on the history of American art. I noted in the PBS Newshour’s obituary this evening that the late Ellsworth Kelly, after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, went to art school on the GI Bill. My Dad was part …
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“hold others in the light”
Walking after Christmas eve dinner, we came upon a rainbow of luminarias around the corner from our house. The luminaria is a tradition in the southwestern United States, a little paper sandwich bag with a bit of sand in the bottom to weigh it down and a candle to light the way for Christ’s spirit. …
The best editor I ever had mostly wasn’t my editor
Oh my, this picture of journalism: That’s my old friend Jim Timmermann, the best editor I ever had, who died last week. He wouldn’t want me to bury the lede. A few days ago, staring at a computer monitor in frustration as I tried to figure out what to type, I quipped thus…. Journalism 1) Understand …
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Roadrunner accessorizes garden art
I was trying to get a shot of our neighborhood roadrunner this morning as it hopped down into Lissa’s garden, a sort of “living Garden Gnome” shot. But I realized as I looked through the results that the garden itself, Lissa’s great work of living art, overwhelms the bird, however cool the roadrunner might be.
It’s hard to explain my daughter’s art, except that she’s good at it
We’re Approaching Global Warming All Wrong & How To Use Conspiracy Theories To Fix It — Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) October 13, 2015 Sometime yesterday afternoon, my “grandbotchild” @thinkpiecebot passed a milestone: my daughter Nora Reed’s digital art now has more Twitter followers than I do. The bot is a thousand lines of code that is …
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