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I had to go that very afternoon. I could not find any other time to pay my last respects to a friend who had died of a heart attack. When I passed in front of a church…
Lyndon Johnson called Carl Sandburg “America.” His experience — as milk wagon driver, hotel porter, bricklayer, farm laborer, servant, coal heaver, and then as poet, journalist, novelist, writer of children’s literature — was a fabric into which…
At about the time of the Second World War, T.S. Eliot wrote “Four Quartets,” a set of four poems, a meditation on how humanity finds itself at the crossroads of time and eternity, and the choice it…
The kerosene lamp lit up the nights of my childhood. Electricity came to our town only years after I, then in my late teens, had left home. We had to make do with the Petromax, a brand…
Edwin Arlington Robinson published his poem, “Richard Cory,” in 1897. Whenever mention is made of this poet, people invariably think of this piece, together with another poem, “Miniver Cheevy.” The two are perhaps the most anthologized of…
I remember a time when we celebrated our grandchild’s birthday anniversary at a pizzeria, amidst a spread of salads, pasta and risottos. The wall of the room his parents had reserved carried a reproduction of a detail…
In 1618, the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez painted “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary.” The work, done in oil on canvas, depicts two women in the kitchen, one young, the other elderly. The young woman,…
I remember a time when going on a trip, particularly by boat, entailed lugging many suitcases, one or two straw mats rolled around four or five pillows and three blankets, a hamper of food, a thermos, feeding…
When a friend posted a photograph of the first fruit of her guyabano tree, I wasted no time to ask her what she did to produce it, especially as her tree did not seem to have put…
Over a month ago, the wife and I attended a workshop in a university town where we spent close to a week, put up in a hotel, which, although old and small, afforded us the basic comforts.…
In 1308, the Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna put an altarpiece together consisting of several separate paintings for the city of Sienna. Aside from a large front panel depicting the Madonna and Child, the work, known as…
At breakfast – eggs, rice, stewed fish – I thought of works of fiction associated with the morning meal. Easily, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel “Breakfast of Champions” came to mind. At first I dismissed it, because it…
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