Recent Entries

• Memory Vaults: What to do with the minutia of our lives

  July 12, 2024

  When Julia Ridley Smith’s parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques shop, and the ephemera of two lives lived, Smith faced a monumental task. What would she do with her ...

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• Golden moments we should record and save for posterity

  July 7, 2024

  I wondered today, walking slowly along the road, how it was that so many simple things give me such exquisite joy.  I saw a gray cat curled up on a window ledge in the morning sun, and stood looking at her with such a sense of fitness, such an understanding of comfort as I cannot describe.…

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• Moments of “ordinary mysticism” live on in our memories

  July 3, 2024

  There are times when I feel most connected to life in the awareness of fleeting experiences that come to me in little epiphanies during the day. It doesn’t matter where I am. They are predicated on many things, however.. The time of day, the weather — including the sky and clouds and how the air&...

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• A walk down Chestnut Street

  June 25, 2024

  It doesn’t have a single chestnut tree on it, this street in a very special city in South Carolina that I once visited often and wrote about frequently. That place is Sumter, where my mother grew up, and where a very dear aunt, who I often visited, lived her entire life . Over the decades…

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• Junior high memories revisited

  June 22, 2024

  Years ago, as part of outreach duties at my job, I found myself in a local middle school at a rescheduled career-day presentation that morphed into “social studies night” for parents coming to pick up their kids’ report cards. I had been asked to talk about miy job and how it impacted students. I...

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• Alone Once Again, Naturally

  June 15, 2024

  Not long ago I posted an entry about a favorite song from the summer and fall of 1972, “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts. There were four other songs that last year of college that have stayed with me all the decades since. Let me preface the following  musical reminiscence with this fact:  I w...

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• Ageless

  June 7, 2024

    This is a poem I wrote three years ago in April 2021, not long after the peak of the of the Covid pandemic with its lockdowns, solitude, and extreme distancing from others so as not to be infected with a virus that was killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly those over 65 like…

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• Secrets of Life

  June 3, 2024

  Secret 65: we should not complain, but always enjoy, and be grateful for the good fortune we still possess. About the secret: In an undesirable situation, or confronted with a loss, the inferior person, bitterly complain and curses his luck. The knowledgeable, successful person, remembers a good ...

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• A time, an unexpected place, and a temporary sanctuary

  May 26, 2024

  We don’t meet people by accident. Everyone is meant to cross our path for a reason. Kathryn Perez From a letter to my sister and brother-in-law, September 29, 1990: It’s late at night, and I’ve been reading, trying to catch up on some time to myself, which I seem to have very little of these…

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