I guess you can teach old dogs new tricks. Again, I learned the hard way. The latest caper began with a lazy, unfortunate fact-checking mistake in a cutline I wrote three weeks ago. Or perhaps it wasn’t laziness at all, but rather just an innocent, misguided assumption about an old, far-too-familiar topic. The problem is that above […]

I suppose it would have represented unavoidable carnage to most observers. Yes, just another pathetic victim of the modern, mechanized world. But to me, the mangled painted turtle said much more, some of it unprintable in old-fashioned news. It’s spooky in a sense. I had been on the lookout recently for turtles I annually pass […]

Another week, new impetus, birds still at the fore. That time of year, I guess: nesting season. What crossed my daily path this time, on a bright, sunny, Wednesday morning, a cool, gentle, westerly breeze keeping my brow dry, was a pair of Canada geese and eight or 10 tiny, day-or-two-old, golden fuzzy goslings paddling […]

Birds are in my brain today as I sit down to hammer out this weekly chore. So, yes, it’s birds I plan to discuss while, of course, fighting off Satanic urges to meander off into the perilous terrain of sensitive topics, which it seems to me readers prefer. As for birds, well, no, I honestly […]

Observations. They jolt me, jostle me, spin my wheels awhirl, often propelling me off to the most unusual and unlikely places, real and imagined. With devilish spring air tickling my lungs, there has been much visual impetus this past week as the sympathy cards, emails and phone calls keep pouring in after the tragic passing […]

Small table-top urns, two of them, showed up recently on my cluttered library’s desk — one blue, the other gold, matching my late sons’ eyes. My wife placed the decorative little canisters there, probably as a shrine. I don’t know, haven’t asked and won’t. In fact, I never even mentioned the eye-color coordination. A coincidence? […]