Last night our little town of Durham lay in the path of a winter storm working it’s way up the East Coast and we got enough snow to make it feel real. Once the ground was covered, I walked out into the street to take a picture of our
I wrote last night about a friend in ICU. Tonight I write to say my friend, David Gentiles, died earlier this evening with his daughters gathered around him. I’ve been staring at the computer screen for a couple of hours looking for words and have come up empty. My
I have spent the last couple of days waiting for news about an old friend who was severely injured and is in ICU; beyond that, the details are not mine to share. Our friendship goes back about twenty-five years, I think; it seems tonight that we have always known each
If someone were driving by our church tonight, they might have mistaken us for Baptists: the parking lot was full on a Wednesday night. The choir was rehearsing, with orchestra, for their Vivaldi offering on Sunday, the bilingual English class was having their Christmas party in the Fellowship Hall, and
After a week with my in-laws, a week where I didn’t have to work and had time to cook dinner in the evenings, I’ve had two days of double shifts split between lunch at the Duke restaurants (making soups, mostly) and evening catering jobs, one on a grand
I’m not sure how much preparing food for five hundred is like preparing the way of the Lord, but I’ve had morning, afternoon, and evening to think about it. The best division of labor was to choose and do one thing: I grilled vegetables – squash, actually – for an
posada they called it, and translated “inn,” in Spanish, then, in robes and scarves and hoods they circled the sanctuary, stopping at each door, singing for their shelter, and being turned away until they got to the door at the altar; they sang again and one little bearded boy bent
In my reading earlier in the week, Madeleine L’Engle (on a page I can’t find now) talked about the necessary structure of life giving us freedom. She used poetry in general, and the sonnet in particular, to make her point: the boundaries of the form create the space
Since I share a birthday with Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Connelly, Emerson Fittipaldi, Tracy Kidder, Dickey Betts, Edvard Munch, John Jay, Gustave Fluabert, and Dionne Warwick, among others, this song feels appropriately celebratory. Peace, Milton
These are the words with which my day began: Raymo 77 I know. I hadn’t heard of it either. But the mourning cloak butterfly, it turns out is one tough little creature, hibernating through the New England winter, among others, and showing up at the first sign of any
Who would think a single motion could carry multiple meanings. I spend my days stirring the soup, measuring out the corn meal, making sure everyone eats well; it is good and honest work. Tonight I stood over the soup in the warm light of our kitchen, carried by the scent
Time is a living thing. We talk about it as something that ticks by or slips away, something we make or take or keep or lose, but it is a force, a dimension, an entity on its own terms. Though we often talk about telling time, we do better to