Summer Jam at Watkins Glen

ONE “Alexander, take the money.”  Alex glanced at the worn ten-dollar bill in Mr. Henri’s work-battered hand. “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate the offer.” Rather than take the money, he grabbed his backpack from the bare metal floor of the old pickup truck, and...

Deep River

In the last hours of a late July day in 1976, Alexander Selkirk walked two miles down the descriptively named Long Hill Road until he came to the town green, a two-acre triangle of land with a scattering of old shade trees. Passing the small black canon, anchored to a...

If I Had a Hammer

“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”—Abraham Maslow Somewhere far upstream in the river of moments that is my Life, in the darkness of an early November evening in Bangor, Maine, as snowflakes the...

The Slingshot Effect

The two questions went off in his mind like flash-bang grenades. Even as the questions reverberated, urgent for an answer, he held them in suspension and zig-zagged across four lanes of Los Angeles traffic, down a curving exit ramp, under a yellow traffic light and...

Observations of an Anthropologist from Another Planet…

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”—E. E. Cummings “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to...