Every other Wednesday, at the unlikely venue of Bigfoot BBQ, the Italian language students meet for conversation. The air is abuzz with questions and answers: “Dov’è la cucina?” “Non lo so.” “Che cosa hai mangiato?” “Non lo so.” For those who have never set foot in Italy, as well as those whose visits number in the dozens, the exercise is the same: Learn...
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Last fall, in the spirit of the Medici family and a handful of Renaissance popes, we built an art shed, a pretty little 13 by 13 building with an open nature and north light. The idea was to draw itinerant artists, artists without studios, to the back yard by creating a kind of diurnal flophouse. Not being a painter or sculptor myself, I imagined men and...
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On days just like this there’s a frozen quality to everything I do or say or write, as if the north wind brings with it the curse of contraction. I know others feel differently. Winter is a quiet time, internal, full of family and firelight, warm drinks, good books. They see the stars reflected in the snow. I see an icy plain that sparkles with the...
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Every December, in the hallway outside the kitchen, my mother tacked up a large piece of construction paper divided into five columns. This was the Christmas list, and on it we five kids were invited to write our wants, our desires. From age 8 to 14 the only things that appeared in my column were two words: rowing machine. Some years it looked like this:...
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John Kennedy was killed on a Friday. The following Monday, our 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Taliaferro, wrote the words “What freedom means to me” on the board. We spent the class period writing our thoughts on this hard-to-grapple-with topic while she put her head down on her desk and wept. I don’t remember what my thoughts were. I do remember that Mrs....
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