Monthly Archives: June 2019

I have been re-reading Nicholas Mansarrat’s Three Corvettes.I read it forty years ago and was astonished by it. It is the precursor to his novel, The Cruel Sea,but it is also a detailed non-fictional account of the tiny warships that … Continue reading →

\ Tonight I will do a filet mignon on the grill. Chubby Humbles was east of the towns of Concord and Walnut Creek, a roadhouse where celebrities like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe visited. There was a glass-fronted case as … Continue reading →

A single cottonwood tree in the Greenhorn Creek meadow, just off highway 70. Cottonwood seeds drift across the meadow and across the creek. The creek moves slowly, the far bank  stabilized by old car bodies, Detroit rip rap, cars from … Continue reading →

Here is the opening of a poem called Markings by Seamus Heany: We marked the pitch, four jackets for four goal posts, That was all. The corners and the square Were there like  longitude and latitude Under the bumpy ground, to be … Continue reading →

a ’39 Ford like mine, only this one is in mint condition, and mine certainly wasn’t I bought the ’39 Ford from Ken Carpenter.  It was a dark green sedan with orange trim inside. The windshield cranked open, there were … Continue reading →

My brother Paul, his wife Bev, Eleanor and I had finished dinner at Fradelizio’s restaurant, and stood on the corner in front of the coffee shop to say our goodbyes. I remember the only time I put my arms around my … Continue reading →

Nearly 50 years ago I planted bamboo along a steep bank next to my downhill neighbor.  I did so to stabilize the bank, and over the years it has grown with a vengeance, as only bamboo can do, coming up … Continue reading →

Hervé’s house in France was like Gary Teply’s house across the street.  Gary would pass someone’s debris box and spot a pair of discarded windows, stop his truck and liberate them. He cut a pair of openings in the wall … Continue reading →

A small black and white photograph, no more than two by three inches, stands on one of my book shelves. It is a photo I took of Graham and me standing next to the ’74 Caprice Classic convertible, somewhere in … Continue reading →

I have a photograph above my desk that I took the first week of October, 1987, celebrating Geoffrey’s twenty-first birthday. Geoffrey is fishing in a pool on Nelson Creek, and Graham is wading toward me. We are just above the … Continue reading →