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 …
Advent is a penitential season. It’s a dark time for getting ready, a time for repair. It’s that last, slow, ungainly month of pregnancy. Daylight is brief, especially this year in downtown Pittsburgh when it’s been cloud-ridden and drizzly nearly every day. My immediate family is in such disarray of various sorts that other than …
A few weeks ago, from Pittsburgh I drove north on I-79 through the deepening autumn to Edinboro, PA to attend an Edinboro University retired faculty luncheon. There was a hearty turn out of all us old profs, and as usual, I was grateful we were all wearing name tags. Every time I go to these …
O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my …
For my birthday last month, my brother, Jerry, and his wife, Lisa, gave me a small acrylic painting they had bought a short walk from their home in Kensington, MD, at my favorite store, The Society for the Prevention of Blindness Thrift Shoppe. They explained that they chose it because of the huge rough frame …
I’m not good at organized small talk. I dread cocktail parties, church suppers, Christmas parties, big birthday parties, even poets’ wine receptions. I seem never to have anything to say face to face with half drunk strangers wearing name tags. Once at an apartment house cocktail party, I asked the landlord a too obvious question, …