As I head towards 50 (in 19 months), I already confront the big-R: retirement. When could/should I retire? How much money do I need to save? Where could I live? What do I want to accomplish before I retire? What do I want to do after I retire? Jay tells …
I’m assessing my apartment for technology that could improve my quiet life. I bought a Bluetooth speaker to put in my kitchen so I can listen to music while I cook. A kettle arrived yesterday so I can boil water in a vessel other than a sauce pan on the …
Faced with the 2020 global Covid pandemic, my brother and I sought a safer alternative to our usual December jet around the world into strange lands. Ray suggested staying instead in the States this year, but go quite remotely off the grid into a swamp. So, Adriene drove with Ray …
Surveying my last year’s goals for 2020, I aimed for balance, community, stillness, and getting lost. Balance meant putting exhausting work into a more manageable context; community hoped for dating, more friends, and drinking less; stillness meant slowing down and looking up at what might follow LEDs; getting lost suggested …
2020 might be a single day in late December, camping on an isolated wooden platform in a Georgia swamp: exist with just a small group of friends, cook all your own foods, brave unexpected weather, watch the rhythms of the seasons. The eight-and-half months of the Covid-19 pandemic shaped most …
At long last, because Ray won a spring sabbatical, we made it to South Africa. Ray, Ruben, Adriene, Lee, and myself boarded planes, trains, and automobiles (with about the same amount of time spent in each) for almost three weeks away. We started the trip with three quick nights in …
I may have only 12 more trips before I cross off all from my world lists. Depending on your adventurousness, twelve may sound like few or a lot. At about one trip per year, I would like foolishly to see it all before I turn 60, then stay home, revisit …
The last year of a tumultuous decade, 2019 brought immense and unexpected career growth at the expense of relationships. I wish the upcoming twenty-twenty swings the balance back towards reflection, art, and unplanned wanders. As I feel fast transitioning through middle age, I would like one more savor of youth …
As our Kenya Airlines flight hurtles mid-morning over the fluffy-cloud South African veld from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe to Cape Town, I consider, on this penultimate day of the decade, the year of 2019 that was. At this time a year ago, I was fleeing a Gulf Coast storm that threatened …
A social demographer wrote awhile back a book called “Bowling Alone” that lamented the rise of Americans doing activities alone, like bowling, which once were intrinsically social. Like much what I write about, I never read that book, but I do empathize with the sympathy of bowling alone. I attend …