Never underestimate the universe’s brilliant, complex, and astonishing perversity. Salish Elder Tony Incashola and long-ago friend and historian Bob Utley both died on June 7. Their deaths–and their lives– shadowed June. I knew each in…
Books are miracles. Their gradual, persistent emergence in our world changed every other element of society, over and over again. Their long, successful slog toward affordability and maneuverability bends my mind. Books have always been…
You gotta love a seven-year-old grandson who can’t get over the odd pattern in the tines of a salad fork that don’t exist in the regular one. Or asks that his next birthday present be…
My Simon, my white ghost, my sun-seeking companion left this world Monday afternoon. As always, my heart breaks more viscerally when my cats die – than even the humans who’ve lighted my way. In their…
A couple Saturday nights ago, I gathered by Zoom with my sister, Sonja, and her two sons, Ben and Tim, and daughter-in-law Lori. Borne of the exigencies of COVID when a summer reunion proved unwise,…
You and I would agree, I think, that heaven such as the one anticipated by “true believers” does not exist. That your Plains Indians heroes and the armies that killed them do not reside on…
Maybe not 50 cents. (For those of you who remember Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.”) But for sure within my budget. Ada Keifer’s red brick Civil War-era house sat at the crook of Baltimore…
This little vignette will make no sense unless you remember a time when most houses had just one or two phones, tethered firmly to a wall. When calls occurred more for arrangements than chats. When…
Grandma Sherfy was my current age—75—in 1963. That year, I was a cocky high school junior—finding my bearings, myself, my prowess. Aunt Blanche would die in November—breast cancer. So would President Kennedy. We were catching…
At the edge of sleep, Just as Simon’s paw reaches under the covers for my cheek, I wake at home. The corner of North Ash and Earl, in McPherson. The brick bungalow that my dad…