Dover Beach The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits—on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air! …. At their return, up …
“The FROST performs its secret ministry.” from “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Now, that this year’s Pittsburgh Pirates’ baseball season is finished, what I most recall are the joyous moments I experienced watching the games on the Roots Sports channel while I sat here in my condo a few hundred yards across the …
Last week, I went grocery shopping at Giant Eagle on S. Braddock Avenue in Pittsburgh with my 90-some-year-old friend, Ginger Carlson, who lives by herself in Wilkinsburg. First, though, we sat on her back porch, watched a black and white cat, splayed flat pretend to stalk a pair of red squirrels who plainly knew a …
I first learned about treachery when my family moved the 3 miles from our small house and farm on U. S. # 19 to a sixteen room house in Mill Village the summer I turned eight. I don’t exactly remember reading that word, treachery, or hearing the word, treachery, used by my parents, but somehow …
Mid-April, I received my yearly Travelers car insurance bill. It was nearly two hundred dollars higher than it was last year. I’d had no claims or speeding tickets on my 2011 Honda Fit which only I drive. Nothing had changed, I thought, until I phoned my agent who informed me that because my divorce was …
Last week mid-March, at my condominium committee meeting, I became aware that more than half the committee members had no way to discuss landscape planting decisions because they had no nouns to identify even the common names of any trees, bushes, or plants. What they readily admitted was that as they walk though Gateway Park …
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charact’ry Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace …
And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly, slowly the …