Quick Silver I remember when the thermometer broke when I was a kid. There was a thin column of quicksilver, mercury, which transformed into several astonishing spheres on the counter. It was magical stuff. Pure mercury is a liquid metal, an element all its own, linked to the Messenger God of classical times. Swift as […]

Bones In my dream I was down on the wreck. The current was not so bad, and I could make out the long gray outline of the submarine. The conning tower was broken off and one of the two periscopes was extended. The root of it was somewhere in the inky shadow that covered the […]

Home The notion of Home is something quite dear, and one we all share. I am delighted to be home, for a number of reasons, though I must write it with a small “h.” Perhaps it was the notion of staying in the airport at Traverse City , or huddled on a bench in the […]

The North always holds the winter to it, even at the height of the summer season. The flowers are fragile, and the cinder block buildings from the time before the construction boom still hint of a drift of old snow around the corner. The new buildings are jolly enough, and that lends a frantic life […]

The bombings are still fresh. They say that not all the dead may have been discovered and brought home yet. It is dark down in the transit network, some of it new when Victoria mourned her lost Albert. I ache for London, that grand old city. Some of the bombs went off in the same […]

Bring It On So, I was thrashing around this morning, almost as soon as my eyes opened. The alarm jolted me, and it hurt. I realized I would be getting up even earlier to catch a plane tomorrow. I thought about the Relationship, and I thought about the move, and in the darkness my eyes […]

Liberal Portions The last time I saw Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale was in the Class Six liquor store across the street from our hacienda-style house in Coronado . It must have been nine years ago, in 1996, or maybe early 1997, just before we left the village. The house we lived in was a […]

Best Tan I had a bunch of stuff to do yesterday, and only got to part of it. I pounded on some job applications in the morning, and some stuff for the radio until after lunch. The sun was out, and the humidity was low, and finally I couldn’t take it any more. I was […]

Lighten Up I was in the office yesterday, the day before a long weekend. For the life of me I could not quite figure out why. No one else appeared to be going to work. The commute was a breeze, and the garage had plenty of parking spaces. Only Andy was in. Mike the Lobbyist […]

Something Cooking It is the morning of the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and my first without historian Shelby Foote to interpret it for me. He might have told me that if General Longstreet had pressed a little harder on the Union left on the second day, or if there had been a few more […]