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Monthly Archives: January 2023

Seaside resorts

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

I’ve always been drawn to the ocean. I grew up in the Pacific Ocean resort town of Manhattan Beach, California. I have lived in Galveston, Texas (Gulf of Mexico); Nome, Alaska (Bering Sea); Dubai, United Arab Emirates (Arabian Gulf); and Brooklyn, New York, and Halifax, Nova Scotia (both on the Atlantic Ocean). I’ve also traveled […]

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Scone by jammy scone

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

The scone as oasis within the travel oasis, or tea and scones, innit? Travel is a mental oasis for me. I love the limbo of airports, the relative freedom from e-mail, the otherworldiness of exiting a subway into the unknown, the break from constant availability. Within this cocoon of travel, however, I often need a […]

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Ripple of the Blue Tattoos

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Loosely based on an encounter in Dover in 1978. Heavy metal vibe. On the Dover docks one night in the middle of a barroom fight, I heard a man call out, “It’s people like you bringin’ this country down.” And wanting to hear more, I took a step inside the door; And an angry man, […]

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Rejected suitors take to roaming as naturally as unhived bees.

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

“Rejected suitors take to roaming as naturally as unhived bees.” It’s a phrase from English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1938) and refers to Diggory Venn (in Arthur Hopkins’ illustration, below). Venn is perhaps my favorite of the Hardy characters in the novel Return of the Native. If the hive is Wessex (Hardy’s partly real, […]

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