Who knows why, but in the last year I’ve been reading surveys of ancient civilizations. I’ve got Sumer and Ur and Babylon on the brain. The most fun parts are surviving letters of middle-Eastern kings to their children, written on clay tablets in cuneiform, but otherwise like modern parents’ letters a litany of dissatisfaction. They … Continue reading “THOSE CRAZY ANCIENTS”
Essentially, in the beginning, it was this: I was 68 and wanted to do this trek before it was too late–the Royal Arch Route, generally agreed to be the hairiest of the regular trails in Grand Canyon. Examined in ordinary grownup terms, it was no place for an aging musician and writer to get himself … Continue reading “GRAND CANYON 2014: I NEVER LOST ANYTHING UNTIL I LOST EVERYTHING”
[Note: This story began as a dream from which I woke shaken. I immediately wrote it down, to see if I could get not just the events but the feeling of the dream into prose. Maybe I did, maybe not. In any case one of the characteristics of dream is that things do not explain … Continue reading “SHORT STORY: IN ANOTHER COUNTRY”
(This is a piece written years ago that I made extensive and unsuccessful efforts to sell.) I was introduced to the splendor of accidental poetry years ago, when I scrounged a box for packing from the back of a stationery store. At home I discovered, written on a flap in magic marker, a lyric … Continue reading “ACCIDENT AND ELOQUENCE IN THE ICEBOX MEDIUM”
We biographers tend to write about people who are famous, who are powerful, who may be little-known but are still extraordinary. Here I propose to tour an imaginary biography of somebody who in the usual understanding of the word was entirely ordinary. But I have opinions about that. Some background. On the whole, biographers … Continue reading “PROSPECTUS FOR A BIOGRAPHY NEVER TO BE WRITTEN”
As best I recall it was a Friday near noon in midsummer, a work day (important point), when the wooden hand-cranked telephone jangled in my grandparents’ hall. Grandmother handed me the earpiece with a sour look and stalked back to the kitchen. It was Bobby calling to say, You gotta come down here. He … Continue reading “MEMORY ON THE THEME OF AN OLD SAW, “AN IDLE MIND IS THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND””
I was delighted recently to hear from a distant Swafford relative about some of her forebears, to whom I’m even more distantly related: “Stingy Jim” Swafford of Sequatchie Valley, Tennessee, and his wife Mary Polly Nail. The latter is a splendid moniker. In her childhood I can hear her mother crying, “Mary Polly Nail, you … Continue reading “WORDS AND GLANCES, ETHNOLOGY DEPT.”