Dear Nicholas, Some years back in a family sit-around, several of my folks were engaging in gallows humor about what word or phrase we’d used so much that we’d wind up repeating it when we were ancient and vacant-minded. In effect, our revealing final words. My brother Franc who was in the clothing business, said […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I’ve always been awed by saltwater. Awe on the open ocean–there’s no better place for astonishment and deep trance. Likely one reason I’m writing a biography of a woman who spent childhood years on her father’s sailing ship. And why I needed ocean sailing for my research. (This biography is now half spiritual […] Read More

Had me a little adventure, Doc! I went to sea on a sailing ship to try to understand the three-part concept that I think of as “Awe Wonder Water.” It was a research trip. The book I’m working on is about a woman who spent six years of her childhood living on her father’s 19th […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, Who of the dead and gone would I most like to talk with? That was the question asked of the three writers on a recent panel at a local library. I hesitated for a quarter-second, though, pagan Christian that I am, I’d known instantly my answer: “Jesus and Daddy.” It wasn’t the expected […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, Yesterday in the hellish heat I ventured again into my jungle of a garden and found it overwhelming. Nature is winning on this little patch, a lot more vigorously than usual. The ground is squishy with vole tunnels. There must be thousands of the little creatures swarming under there, eating plants from the […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, Why should I or anyone have a lifelong fear of math? “Feel the fear and do it anyway” doesn’t work, at least not for me. Yesterday I included two bills with a bank deposit, a twenty and a ten. The teller at the drive-through had to tell me that twenty plus ten does […] Read More

  Dear Nicholas, Good conversation today–face-to-face in person! Your coming to town only a couple of times a year does encourage focus in the therapeutic hour. Lots of good take-away especially about getting to sleep faster.   My notes:   For getting to sleep faster at night… Paradoxically, use a morning ritual. Start the day […] Read More

Nicholas, Doing some window-shopping today, I suddenly realized how many new and not-so-new trends I don’t take part in. I started making a list and I’m shocked. Am I old-fashioned or simply being particular? Not that I begrudge others the pleasure, but there’s a lot of very popular stuff I don’t do, including: *blue or […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, I fell. I’m refusing to think of this as an “old person thing,” though I do know that physicians like to ask their more mature patients, “Have you fallen in the last three months?” as if that were significant information. Gardening in the Dark I was out doing some late-night watering and inexplicably […] Read More

Dear Nicholas, A man I talked with on a bus in 1970 emailed to tell me that something I said on that ride kept him alive in a life raft decades later in brutal cold 400 miles east of Gander, Newfoundland.  You can imagine how flattered and stunned I was. One of my most troubling obsessions […] Read More