It’s a Cuba Thing
I claim no grand comprehension of the challenge of life there. But Cuba is … well, Cuba. A confounding, transformative, depressing, challenging, intoxicating place.
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Dear General de Gaulle …
The email arrived one day recently in my in-box from Glasgow, Scotland: Did you know, it said, that a letter your friend Sister Mary Pellicane sent to Charles de Gaulle is on sale on eBay in London? Um ... no. What?
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‘I Am Too Serious’
'Hey, here you go. What's your name? Where'd you serve?' He nods in thanks. Stuffs the bag into a pocket. Tom. That's his name. He takes off his black knit cap. Syria. Iraq. 'A shell took off part of the top of my head.' I wince. He points to a jagged line. 'The Med Evac was the best. Saved my…
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It’s an altar boy thing
Let's not talk about the moon anymore, but instead Solzhenitsyn's idea of 'political horror,' how to write a 'sorta memoir,' and breaking up with Twitter until the perp walk.
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Essays
Seeing Red in Downtown Cincinnati
When the Opening Day parade for the Cincinnati Reds 2022 season snaked through downtown Cincinnati more was going on than it might at first seem.
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A Dozen Ways to Look at Chicago, Illinois
I've always been intrigued by human beings whose lives are lived just below and sometimes at the level of the clouds. They surround us by the thousands, the tens of thousands. In blue rooms, staring at TVs in their skyboxes. Doing Downward Facing Dog, 2,000 feet above the sidewalk.
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“The Key To My Grandfather’s House”
What unites us is that we are all immigrants of one kind or another. Here is one family's tale out of the hills of Calabria to the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio and beyond.
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Getting Ready for Loss in a Pandemic
A huge wave of dying and grief is headed our way from the Covid-19 pandemic. And for that we must be prepared to share the burden—and share the joy, even—of coming together even as things fall apart.
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Essays
Nature’s Not Sheltering in Place
t looks like the violets have returned from wherever violets over-winter. They are small, but distinctive. Kind of like the Pekinese of the front yard. Meanwhile, out on the deck the cardinals are just as prevalent as the violets. Flitting about like there's no tomorrow. Maybe for us. Not for them, it looks like.
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What Have You Done With All the Jerks?
What do you do when people act in a totally, unexpected, strange, unnerving manner in an age when civility is in the ER hooked up to an IV?
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Hanging with the Dalai Lama after the bombs fall silent
Getting close-up and personal in Belfast, Ireland, with the Dalai Lama and Christian monk Father Lawrence Freeman as they talk peace after the bombs between Catholics and Protestants fall silent.
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The night the house came crashing down around me
A portrait of the artist as a skinny kid attempting the impossible task of fixing the most important relationship in his life up to that point. While standing there in his pajama bottoms and t-shirt as the house began to shake.
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