Spearfish, North Dakota
Three little windshield wipers rattled back and forth while Rich’s white MGB convertible barreled down the freeway in the rain with the top up. Rich was my roommate at the University of Pennsylvania, and we were going home for summer vacation at the end of our junior year. Our butts felt the shock of every […]
High-Rise South
Following is the second excerpt which I cut from my forthcoming memoir, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER “Howdy!” said my new roommate Scott, when I opened the door to my room on the twenty-third floor of High-Rise South, the dorm on the University of Pennsylvania campus where I had been assigned for the spring semester of my […]
Summer in France
Author’s note: in revising my forthcoming memoir, tentatively titled LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, I naturally needed to make some cuts, but it occurred to me that some of the deleted passages would make interesting entries for my “Commentary” blog. Here is the first such entry. When I visited Paris for the first time at the age […]
Summer in France
Author’s note: in revising my forthcoming memoir, tentatively titled LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, I naturally needed to make some cuts, but it occurred to me that some of the deleted passages would make interesting entries for my “Commentary” blog. Here is the first such entry. When I visited Paris for the first time at the age […]
Invisible Dragons
Growing up in Seattle in the 1950s and ‘60s, I had no word for “gay.” My father was a distinguished professor of architecture, and in my teen years, I remember walking around the Modern house that he had designed for us in Laurelhurst, saying “I hate myself” loud enough for my mother and younger brother […]
THE ENDURING APPEAL OF MALCOLM X
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” is one of the most engrossing, thought-provoking books I have ever read. Part of its power is that when you turn its pages, you are transported not so much into the past as into the present-day decades of the forties, fifties, and sixties. When the flight returning Malcolm X from […]
SELLING DAD’S HOUSE
SELLING DAD’S HOUSE One morning in the spring of 2015, my father fell and broke his hip. Fortunately, he was in the master bathroom, so he didn’t fall down the stairs. Even better, the caregiver whom we had hired to look in on him almost every day turned the key, entering the house only moments […]
MALCOLM X AND RELIGION
written on the 58th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination (February 21, 1965) Just in time for Black History Month, I woke up one morning realizing I knew absolutely nothing about Malcolm X or what he stood for. Like any other ignorant white person, my stereotypical view restricted Malcolm to a black nationalist who strove to […]
THUMBNAIL BOOK REVIEW: “THE GREAT PRETENDERS” BY LAURA KALPAKIAN
December 17, 2022 In this masterpiece of a novel set in the Hollywood of the mid nineteen-fifties, the travails of black-listed screenwriters are deftly juxtaposed with the faraway struggle of Rosa Parks’ bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Named for Cyrano de Bergerac’s great love, the heroine, Roxanne Granville, is born to Hollywood royalty in the […]
AMBITION VERSUS RETIREMENT
January 15, 2023 I used to be ambitious. As a child encouraged to draw and paint by my parents and grandparents, I assumed that I was destined for artistic triumphs. Later, I transmuted my imagined masterpieces into works of landscape architecture. Maybe I would design the next Versailles or the next Central Park. Who knew? […]