A few years ago, my daughter and I were playing Battleship, and she shot misses on spaces C 8,9, and 10. Or that’s how I remember it and had it marked. But later she said “C9,” and I said, “you already tried that one, sweetie.” She said “No I didn’t. I shot J 8,9, and...
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Americans have a reading problem. For starters, fewer of us can be found with our noses in a book these days. According to a recent Gallup poll, book readership is on the decline, with just 6% of U.S. adults naming reading as their favorite way to spend an evening. That’s down from 12% in 2016....
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We long to be loved and we long to love, all of us. And while we sometimes get it more right than not, sometimes we fail miserably, wounding ourselves and others. The desire for intimacy is so deep we will do the most glorious and the most ruinous things, hoping that someone somewhere will want...
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On a recent visit to The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, I was drawn to a painting I had not seen there or anywhere else before. My first guess was that it was by Rembrandt because the overall hue was that rich dark brown the great Dutch painter used so frequently. And like...
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“You are mistaken; the beautiful is as useful as the useful… more so, perhaps.” These words have been running through my heart the last week. Making sense of life for life, of what matters and what doesn’t, of what we believe to be the good, the true and the beautiful, and what is not, is...
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Tacos and tortillas are easy. And adios is like that. But what about las golondrinas? and Sacramento? Having grown up in California, I began to learn Spanish in the second grade, making my way through elementary letters and numbers, year by year learning something of the complexity of another language. And while I never became...
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