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Dancing is a way we forget. Breathless loops, swirling baubles, music pulling memories from who knows where and making new ones as we move. We danced together, and that was a cementing moment. You who may be my best friend, my lonely partner, my father, my mother, my siblings in spirit, strangers in the…

I have a squirrel. Or should I say I feed a squirrel, or maybe a few, I cannot tell. They land singularly (squirrels are very territorial) on my balcony and I have, I admit, given myself to their immediate cuteness and plaintive eyes imploring another fist full of nuts. I place the items in…

I never liked you Joan Didion. In life I doubt we would be friends. Your spindly fingers that held one too many cigarettes, your squinty eyes cynical and incisive. You would not have approved of me – whatever my accomplishments or gains that would have lead me through your door and into your living…

Bruegel painted it; Auden eulogized it; an article by Elisa Gabbert today’s NYT shined a light on it, and I felt it. It’s a musing on a 1560 painting by Pieter Bruegel the elder: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It is not an eye-shattering work. The subject matter is simply a day in the…

It wasn’t Detroit in ’68. It was not even Richard. It was dark. It was dark café days. And it was a time when the U.S. was at war with itself. It wasn’t the first time but I did not know that it would not be the last. The nights were hot and playing…

I didn’t stay at 11 Howard in New York. Rather, I drew it in and breathed it scene by scene, room by room, all 14 floors of it. There was a lot of talk about it in the day, and my job was to write about it for an overseas inflight as a headwind…

When I last visited Tunisia it was 1984. The government had chosen to end subsidies on wheat and semolina and bread. The public rose up, people were killed, political discussions happened in whispers against peeling walls of limestone and coral. Jobs were scarce, women wore veils and the poor were getting poorer. But something odd…

  Graham Greene stayed there. And so did Joan Baez, Jane Fonda and Charlie Chaplin. And then came Donald Trump. The Hotel Métropole in Hanoi has seen its share of dictators and peacemakers and novel writers and artists in its 121 years of serving as the pre-eminent hotel of Hanoi. And today, the ghosts…

We trudged off to the land beyond our oceans to find rare bats that were bigger than basketball players. We also targeted four-eyed fish with bone structures that pre-dated the dinosaurs and a rare flower emitting a scent rumored to calm all ills. We found it all in the Comoros, an island chain in…