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I know I wasn’t the only one who struggled with what to say in my sermon today. I chose the passage a few weeks back—Luke 6:39-49—and it gave me a good jumping off place this morning. As I prepared the sermon, I kept thinking about words
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It was on a summer day some thirty years ago that I sat across from my friend Billy for our fifth or sixth consecutive night of eating lobster at Nunan’s Lobster Hut in Kennebunkport, Maine. I loved lobster, so the chance to eat there night after night was heaven.
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I was driving home from church on Sunday when a song crossed my mind I had not thought of in a long time. “Hey, Siri,” I said, “play ‘My Old Man’ by Steve Goodman.” She repeated my request and the song began. The version I have is from a live
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I was just finishing up at the gym on Monday when I got a text from Ginger asking if I wanted to meet her for coffee at RJ Julia and read for a while. My answer, of course, was yes--the one catch being I didn’t have a book with
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Last January I wrote about one of the articles in the New York Times’ “7-Day Happiness Challenge” where one writer described “The Secret Power of the Eight Minute Phone Call” in rekindling a friendship. Someone she had not heard from in a long time asked for an eight minute phone
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The title of the interview was “The Pleasures of Disorientation”--a phrase that caught my attention. It was another in Conversations with Billy Collins, and from it came these words, in response to the question, “What is it about mystery and disorientation that is so appealing?”: For disorientation to be
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I have had a quiet day today marking what would have been my mother’s ninety-first birthday. As I sat down to write, I went back to what I wrote for and read at her memorial service. They seemed like good words to repeat. When my father died, I adapted
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the reading list I finished reading one of my Christmas books today: The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams. Ginger gave it to me because “it looked like I would like it.” She was right. The book centers around the relationship between two people: Mukesh, a widower who lives in
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The afternoon that they moved my mother into hospice her doctor came to check on her. Although we all knew she would never leave the hospital, her death was not imminent. She looked at the doctor and said, “If my goal is heaven, what do I have to do?” He
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For the last seven years the first two weeks of January have belonged to my mother. She went into hospice just after New Year’s Day 2016 and died on January 15, three days after her eighty-fourth birthday. I got to spend all of those days with her. Tonight, this
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On this Twelfth Night, this Epiphany Eve, i found myself going back through some old posts and poems. I wrote the first version of the poem below when we lived in Marshfield, Massachusetts in a house 660 feet from Cape Cod Bay. Walking the beach at low tide was a
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In my newsletter yesterday, I leaned into a quote from Kieran Setiya. The last sentence reads, Don’t let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive. I have been dealing with the article for a couple of days, but I didn’t