I don’t know if you remember Flagstaff in the late ‘70s. I was a newcomer here, living out in the wilderness of Doney Park. I shared a bungalow with an attorney who worked in town, and in the field next door lived two horses, one white, one gray. I was quite the romantic and named the white one Pure Thought, a name I also bestowed on my white truck. We all...
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The year I played the cello was the same year I voted for Nixon, and if I had to say which one was the greater act of conviction I’m afraid I’d have to go with Nixon. Tricky Dick had not yet earned his name because in that particular election he did not become the president of the United States. The Senator from Massachusetts did. John F. Kennedy. I was...
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Mr. Barclay’s Dancing School met every Wednesday afternoon in the ballroom of the Pierre Hotel in New York City. There, under the gaudy chandeliers and watchful eyes of our instructors, we learned the rituals designed to secure us future husbands, children and happiness. At the same time, across the Pacific, the war in Vietnam was heating up, and on our...
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The Pine Tree Market sits between the newsstand and a Lilly Pulitzer dress shop on Main Street, Northeast Harbor. Its green awning offers shade from the weak sun and shelter from the soft persistent rains that wrap the Maine islands from June through August. Fog settles thickly in the harbor below the town, sometimes for weeks. The fancy yachts come in,...
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The poet Jane Hirshfield writes, “A world—or book—that is felt to contain the hidden is inexhaustible to the imagination.” Poetry is the subject at hand, but she might as well be talking about fishing. Or about my father when she writes, “Hiddenness is the ballast in the ship’s keel, the great underwater portion of a life that steadies the rest.” I took up...
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