Last night the boys had Tae Kwon Do testing. They’re now the proud owners of a green belt with a blue stripe. Although their master during the belt ceremony reminded all the kids not to focus on the belt but on the discipline and hard work of learning their techniques, let’s be serious, the very …
Continue reading Tae Kwon Do or Tae Kwon Don’t, either way you’ll regret it.
Three dudes, three radically different perspectives on most things, let alone ultimate questions. In rereading my post from yesterday on recovering from surgery, I was struck by the fact that, even in taking myself down a peg for my approach to illness and recovery – imagining what Nina would have made of it all -- I …
This week was weird, even for me. On Monday I had knee surgery. It is the kind of knee surgery that’s so routine that the surgeon feels pretty blasé about telling you he does 15-20 of them a day. But there is no routine surgery when you’re the patient, and in my case, there is …
Continue reading Stool softeners, Zofran, and other remembrances of loves past
I am having surgery tomorrow. It's very minor surgery. I’ve had a balky right knee for ages and it finally just gave up during a jog a couple weeks ago. The surgery is just to repair a torn meniscus. It’s the kind of surgery that’s so minor the doctor told me I could opt to …
To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,who neither listen nor speak;Who do not drink their tea, though they always saidTea was such a comfort.From Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, by Edna St. Vincent MillayLoneliness isn’t actually a disease. I checked the DSM-V. But it’s got …
Continue reading Only the lonely (need to read this post, and maybe not even them?)
Relativism is not a helpful mode for grieving. By nature it has no fixed position, which is problematic when someone’s already adrift because one of the central fixed points of their life – a loved one -- is gone. Bare relativism isn’t that helpful generally: how many idiotic conversations have been started in college classrooms …
Continue reading Relatively speaking about grief (and other mistakes I’ve made).
"the possible settingsof a web are infinite:how doesthe spider keepidentitywhile creating the webin a particular place?how and to what extentand by what modes of chemistryand control?it iswonderfulhow things work: I will tell youabout itbecauseit is interestingand because whatever ismoves in weedsand stars and spider websand knownis loved:in that love,each of us knowing it,I love you,for …
When Nina died, one of the things she left me was the ownership of two vehicles. The first, my primary car when she was alive, was a Mazda 3, a small sedan with a six speed manual transmission. It's both fuel efficient and fun to drive. The second was a Mazda CX-9, a crossover with …
Continue reading My midlife crisis seats seven and has a power rear lift-gate.
Montaigne wrote that every life is complete when it ends. He wanted death to find him planting his cabbages, concerned neither with mortality or even less his unfinished garden (but apparently overmuch with digestive health—why no radishes, arugula, or Japanese mustard greens, eh Michel?). We are always in the mode of becoming who we are, …
Afterword 