The first camera I owned was a pinhole camera. I made it myself at summer camp in New Jersey. It was 1963, the year of a July solar eclipse, and the good people of Camp Red Ram came up with a plan to keep us from looking directly at the sun. We’d spent many days making keychain lanyards and plaster casts of raccoon prints. We learned how to sew our own pup...
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With a well-intended but somewhat unorthodox show of manners, I once picked up a roadkilled pheasant to bring to a friend who invited me to dinner. The bird was still warm. It had a broken wing but no visible trauma to the meaty body. It had clearly been hit by a passing vehicle only moments before. I was headed for the hills, the Knobs of Kentucky, on a...
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As I entered the bosque of adolescence, I was lucky. I had my particular bible. It was a thin book with brown and brittle pages that had not held up well to use and age. On the cover was Perseus, winged sandals on his feet, a thick sword in his right hand and in his left the head of Medusa, her scalp dripping with snakes. The book was called, simply,...
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About 2,500 years ago a man was seen walking the byways of India, a bowl in his hands. He was bald-headed and simply clad. His clothing covered him but did not speak of preference or fashion. He was variously barefoot or shod, depending on who he had met in his peregrinations and whether or not they themselves needed shoes. If the need was there, they...
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For many years I lived in a very small town at the tip of Cape Cod, Mass. Cape Cod is shaped like a Turkish slipper or an elf’s shoe, and where the slipper finishes its curl, or where a bell might hang from an elf’s shoe, is a town called Provincetown. It’s a town of artists and writers, poets and actors, gay men and women, teachers and plumbers and bakers...
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