Recent Entries

• Music immortals

  August 11, 2020

  For the first time in many years I finally have a lot of that that precious commodity called “time.”  I worked full -time until I retired in 2017 and continued on taking care of my mother who suffered with dementia and diabetes.  I had been taking care of her pretty intensively for the five years...

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• “The Green, Green Grass of Home”

  August 9, 2020

  I  was going about my afternoon ritual of surfing though YouTube this afternoon, and just happened upon a clip from a U.K. TV station about Tom Jones on the occasion of his 80th birthday (two months ago).  Now that is truly hard to believe.  They had put together a 52-minute retrospective of his ...

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• Revisiting the old mill pond of my youth

  August 8, 2020

    This is a follow-up entry to my previous posting on memory, wherein I dug far back into my online journal archives, as well as my old print journals, to retrieve writing on this most fascinating of subjects for me. The essay below is based on one of the most powerful and satisfying memorie...

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• Gazing into the deep pool of memory

  August 6, 2020

  It’s puzzling  how one remembers many of the things that of happened to them in the past.   It is even more strange how some of these things are so small and unimportant. Yet, you seem to want to think back to them and not forget them.  In this account of my life,   I will…

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• The Sixties and the Songs of Our Lives

  July 28, 2020

  “I have a theory about getting old.  First you’re a teenager, and then you’re in your 20s feeling big.  Then things get a bit blurry, and the next thing you know you’re 70 and wondering  where it all went.  But I was a teenager again there for a moment” YouTube reaction to “Surf City” by…

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• Love languages for those with dementia, and for us, too

  July 24, 2020

  When I was taking of care of Mom as her dementia and physical infirmity grew worse year by year, I had a number of shields that, looking back now, protected me from succumbing to depression and despair. One of those was time, the sheer length of time that constituted her decline. It was so gradua...

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• Queen of the Southern Garden

  July 18, 2020

  It’s July 18, but there’s  more than a calendar date to tell me the middle of summer is here with all its furnace-like heat and humidity. There are also summer’s uniquely timeless and mood-evoking memories.   For me here in South Carolina there are two things that most predictably  take me back t...

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• No one is safe from Covid-19

  July 15, 2020

  Worst of all, too many Americans seem not to understand that the novel coronavirus is still very much with the U.S. - and people are dying every day because too many people are ignoring the simple steps we can all take to help protect one another. It begs the question, if the pandemic is so…

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• If ever there was a time for reconsidering our way of life, this is it

  July 11, 2020

  In the afternoons lately I've been doing a lot of thinking, sitting on the big sofa in the den in a quiet empty house day after day.  My thoughts  constantly keep coming back to the Covid crisis, how I’m coping with it, what precautions I continue to need to take.  And I’m very worried about…

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