An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
Yesterday in a belated Father’s Day celebration, my step-daughter (she the math teacher, she with the 9-month-old boy) took her dad and me to Target Field to watch the Twins. It was hot. The Twins were not. But we were … Continued
My adorable, second-cousin Eleonora has a small apartment in assisted living. She is 94. When she and her sister Sadie moved to this Presbyterian Homes complex–regular apartments, cottages, assisted living, and the “health center”–in 1998, they were still vigorous. Eleonora … Continued
I’m tempted to pull a Jonathan Swift* and champion a world where perfect lawns flow emerald green and uniformly clipped, from coast to coast, sea to sea. Where trees die by the millions, poisoned by IMPRELIS, a touted “green” herbicide … Continued
To have the quiet and concentration to call up into the mind’s eye a great work of art, and let that eye survey and pause, query and recall requires either daily monasticism or illness. Not illness of a ravaging sort, … Continued
Since I seem to have born with an academic calendar in my head, mid-May to Labor Day is a season out of time and work. Especially in the last five years since I’ve declared verboten any teaching during the summer. … Continued
You could tell my mother was fading because she became pale. She no longer remembered visitors’ names as she walked the porch across her South Carolina house. She slept and slept. Eleonora, my 94-year-old second cousin, is fading too. But … Continued
As opposed to the wonderful Polish, Noble-prize-winning Wislawa Symborska, I do not lie on the sofa with pad at an angle and, for hours, puzzle out a poem. It comes to me in motion. One of the watershed learnings … Continued
We had to yell at Fran’s brother Lester: “Get out of New Orleans!” It was the morning before Katrina hit. These two brothers have a history of ignoring the obvious. Lester had moved out of Minneapolis five years before, vowing … Continued
From start to last, Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence reeks of love and sex and, in part, of privilege. Yet, underlying the main character’s obsession with Fushon, a young woman at least 15 years younger than he, is an … Continued
Back in the days before the transcontinental highway system and the plethora of family cars, we took the train. Almost every summer with our North Dakota mother (who didn’t drive), we boarded the Seaboard Air Line or later the Atlantic … Continued