Junior high memories

6:15 p.m.
3/27/07

I am now at a local middle school, at a rescheduled career-day presentation that is now social studies night for parents coming to pick up report cards. I had been asked to talk about miy job and how it impacts students. The only problem is I am stuck in a healh sciences classroom at the end of a long hall, and not too many parents and students are finding their way here. I sit writing journal entries on some scrap paper, thilnking about how many eons ago I was a student in New Orleans public schools. This place reminds me of my junior high where I spent part of 7th and all of 8th and 9th grades. The school was brand new when we moved in somewhere during my 7th grade year, I think it was 1963. I often felt very isolated and stuck for interminable hours each day in a vast, impersonal facility, with endlessly long concrete-block-walled hallways lined with rows of lockers, each with a Master combination lock. I am sure you remember fumbling with those contraptions between classes. I can recall those times now -- the clanging bell to change classes, taking books out of my locker and slamming the door shut, and walking to English, history or science class through a packed hall full of chattering, babbling students letting off pent-up energy before their next period of confinement within four walls, presided over by teachers of various levels of competence and commitment to the profession.

6:05 p.m.
3/29/07

Resuming this entry:

I was busy writing at the middle school where I left off above when the event coordinator told me that since there were not too many parents showing up, I was free to leave. I did not have to take a hint. I grabbed my things and left with the t-shirt the assistant principal had given me in appreciation for showing up.

A few final thoughts on my junior high experience. It was not one of the finest and most enjoyable chapters of my young life. Iwas never one for teeming crowds, students or otherwise. I was very tall and gangly -- 6 ft. 1 in. -- and thin. Although I liked to play basketball, I had an aversion to organized sports, yet I had to endure a period of time (punishment for something apparently) on the junior varsity team, where I warmed the bench during games. I hated that. Then there were the awkward and nerve-wracking school dances in the cafeteria which I attended on a couple of occasions, both times feeling very out-of-place and foolish.

I don't think I was alone in believing that junior high was a very awkward and even scary stage of early adolescence. I was such a serious student, and everything had to be just right: homework done on time, tests thoroughly studied for to the point of overkill, attention paid in class. I don't remember having a lot of fun during those years. However, I was considered a model students by my teachers, one of whom let me grade quizzes in her class and another, the most feared teacher in the school, taking very kindly to me since I was such a well-behaved youngster, eagerly listening to everything she said. I was just extremely conscientious and worried about everything and I tried to please my teachers. I guess I was just brought up that way.

There were incidents I will never forget such as being taunted by a bully in 8th grade and lashing out at him finally, only the second time in my life that I was in a fight. I was a very peaceable, non-violent person. He never bothered me again though I was hopelessly out-maneuvered and he was embarrassed that I was such a wimpy guy, flailing my arms around and trying to land a punch as he danced around me. None of the other kids thought it was funny, and they felt bad for me. I was not an unpopular student. He humiliated himself that day.

By 9th grade I was ready for high school. I was older and more mature, although I was alway much more mature than my chronological age. I did have a very good grounding in grammar and English compositiion skills in both 7th and 8th grades, and this was invaluable in preparing me for my later writing career and encouraging my love of writing. It was something that came naturally to me, but I am so fortunate also to have had good English teachers.

When we got report cards at the end of that year, I felt a chapter in my life had ended and awaited with expectation over the summer my entrance to the hallowed halls of high school.

Familiar terrain and finding home

I spent many years in a state of exile from home, and part of the reason was that I didn’t have a home. I had a birthplace, as well as a place where vacation dreams unfolded in my youth, and a place I imagined would one day be home, but no place where I could, as Scott Russell Sanders says, "stay put."

I restlessly veered from one short-term job or teaching assignment to another, from temporary-permanent work to unemployment, and back again in a cycle that seemed to go on and on with no end in sight. The long road west on my travels during the 1980s beckoned time and again -- in the vast deserts of Wyoming I could find at least a small measure of clarity in the great emptiness and silences, but they threatened to engulf me if I stood still too long. So I kept moving.

I remember when I came across the essay by Sanders which first appeared in Orion Magazine, and in which he wrote these words at one point: "To become intimate with our home region, to know the territory as well as you can, to understand your life as woven into the local life does not prevent you from recognizing and honoring the diversity of other places, cultures, ways. On the contrary, how can you value other places if you do not have one of your own?" I’ve just re-read this essay from a collection of his writing subtitled, "Making a Home in A Restless World." The first time I read it, I was still adrift. Now, I am at last home, and it is indeed the place where, in the back of my mind, I always thought I might be at some point in my life.

It seems unreal to me at times that I have lived these past twelve years in Charleston with no need or desire to cast off for far shores, to answer the siren call of the road muse who lured me off on many a grand, but short-lived odyssey of travel in the past. Necessity drives a hard bargain, but since I knew no home port, I gladly accepted the temporary happiness of flight into the unknown. At least I wasn’t spinning in one place with anxiety and dread, but aiming for some distant place, heading who know where, and hopeful, at least, that travel would not make the current situation I was in any worse. Each leafy town I passed through, each cafe on the square where I had breakfast, each early morning stillness filled with new and exotic sounds and smells only drove home more intensely the fact of my rootlessness. "Thanks for coming, come back soon," the signs would say as I’d exit one town after another and be back on my way along that long open highway.

Maybe that’s why the taste of freedom from obligation and responsibility is so pleasurable. You don’t have to come back soon if you don’t want to. You keep on moving. Keep on keeping on.

And then, Sanders says, you become "an inhabitant rather than a drifter." I suppose, in a way, this marks the end of youth, whatever age that signifies today. When you reach the end of the road, you can no longer drift aimlessly. You have to make a stand. And that point may come, or be forced on you, quite unexpectedly, again out of dire necessity or through something as simple as the exhaustion of possibilities.

As I return to my home day after day, following the familiar contours in the road, looking at the big oak tree at the curve, slowing down at the same, precise spots with a kind of attunement to cosmic laws of motion, I realize I am not running any more, but home. The sameness is not dull or monotonous as I might have once thought, but reassuring and familiar. An indifference to monotony, and, therefore, a rejection of it, takes hold. There comes at last a knowledge and deep familiarity with a place, with the landscape that surrounds you, that is so abiding and so seemingly permanent, that you no longer think as often about taking off for faraway lands in a car loaded with all your belongings and hugging an endless country road leading only to some temporary shore far off in the imagination.

Interview

Q1: As a young man, did you have dreams and ambitions that are still as yet unfulfilled? What if anything will you to about this?

A. This is always a fascinating question and one which makes me look inside myself for some answers. I feel I have probably resolved them one way or another during the course of my life's journey these past 54 years, and yet, there is always the chance to confront the question anew, as now.

I am really not sure I had "dreams and ambitions" as such. I seemed to always follow the path of my heart's desires. Being a reflective, private person I think I subconsciously sought out work and professions that let me be more social, expansive, and outgoing, all of which I am very much capable of. I sought and took jobs which allowed me plenty of opportunities to interact with and get to know other people.

All through school I did well in writing and English, so it was natural that I would pursue some sort of writing career after receiviing my B.A. in English. Thus, I went into journalism, specifically, community journalism. By this I refer to small town or city weeklies or twice weekly newspapers. I found myself interviewing, photographing and writing about so many interesting and genuinely good and nice people that I really seemed to come alive. I thrived at this. I was young and idealistic. It was perfect for me at the time. I worked long hours and relished what I was doing. And, I was proud of my bylined stories, columns and published photographs. It gave me a great sense of satisfaction. It staved off the loneliness I so often felt. I became outgoing. I was another person from my private self while "on the job."

Similarly, when I went into teaching, I was able for the first time to delve into poetry, essays, short fiction and novels -- in-depth -- because I was learning as much as I was teaching or bringing out in my students. They infused me with life and energy. Again, I felt truly alive to the possibilities of life, apart from my rather insular, private life.

When I was in graduate school, I began to retreat back into the reclusive person I tend to be, doing most things by myself and pondering the mysteries of life in many inner dialogs and, at times, severely moody and depressed periods of self reflection.

So, in answer to the question, I think I fulfilled in the best way I knew how at the time, the desires of my heart, but they were "dreams and ambitions" that were not so much formulated and acted upon as they were actions and responses to life as I confronted it daily. I never really had short-term or even long-term dreams. I dealt with the situations in life where I was led or where I myself consciously desired to go and then tried to do my best, conscientiously, for myself and others.

Q2: Your love of beauty and general philosophy/belief system shows a very sensitive man. At what point and what triggered this 'enlightment'?

I can always recall being a "sensitive" child and adolescent, introspective, capable of worrying about the world's problems at a very early age. I was always an excellent and fastidious student, I enjoyed learning and poring over books, magazines and encyclopedias. My mother used to be startled and amazed at what I worried about when I was younger. I am not so sure this was healthy, but that was who I was.

There was nothing specifically which which triggered this. I have always been "apart" from others enough to sense that I was different, or at least to my mind I felt this way. Never having had a truly "close" friend when I was in grade school and high school, I depended on myself. I lived within my own worlds. I related to, and could talk much more comfortably with, adults than with my peers. I loved reading. I had an innate love of Nature and this is probably the influence from childhood that has persisted longer than anything else. I didn't live in the country and have pretty scenery and creeks and woods to explore as a child, but I always imagined what this would have been like.

Q3: If you could influence a major change in the world, what and how would you?

I think I would get more actively involved in environmental work here in the Charleston area, do more than I am doing now. I believe that major changes in the world start locally.

Q4: As a child, were you a dreamer/philospher or were you a 'typically' active kid, and in what way?

I was an odd mixture of both. I loved being outdoors as much as possible in the years prior to my adolescence and engaged in all kinds of imaginative games and the creation of places which further fed my imagination. This, thankfully, was in the pre-Internet and computer games age. The dark, cool world within the giant legustrum bushes of my early childhood apartment, for example, where we kids found refuge on hot summer afternoons, is one example. I have written about some of these experiences before.

Q5: Where do you see yourself in the future, say - 10 years from now?

I see myself doing my present job and nearing retirement and being totally and ecstatically ready for it, but other than that I have no idea. I have never been good at projecting myself into the future. For instance, I would never have guessed I would be doing my present job, and yet it is probably the most logical and perfectly suitable work based on my past experiences and my abilies that I could ever imagine doing. Yet it came to me unplanned and unexpectedly. Life is like that. I am not a big believer in planning.

Crystal cave

It was a pleasant evening in old Charleston's historic district, and we were all walking in the market area. The city in recent years has come alive with nightlife. People were out in droves, gawking at the sights, dining in restaurants, popping in and out of gift and souvenir shops, stopping for dessert and ice cream, window shopping, taking in the scene. So were we: my brother and I were accompanying my sister and my niece and nephew visiting from the Seattle area. It is rare and a special time indeed when all three of us siblings are together for an outing.

Our goal was a curious and very busy shop in the market that my nephew likes go to to every time he comes to Charleston...It's called Black Market Rock and Mineral Shop, I believe. What an interesting place. What a loaded name... Lots and lots of rocks and rock-made gifts and objects of curiosity. Imports. There are boxes of rocks and all sorts of eclectic gifts. Stuff you've never seen before. Like I say, it was packed with people. Curiosity, I guess, is part of it. Novelty. Never know what you'll find in a place like that.

I was never a rockhound. I always liked those little open box sets with all the main types of stones and minerals represented. You probably remember them. They always contained pretty quartzes and crystals and fools gold...and this and that. I can't remember the details. Fool's gold always intrigued me, though, for both symbolic and literal reasons. But it's been years since I even looked at rocks much.

So I was wandering around the store, picking up and examining for some time bits of polished petrified wood, which I find quite amazing and beautiful. Ever since i visited Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona years ago, I have never forgotten how beautiful those rocks are. I was looking for just the right pattern in those little pieces of wood turned to rock. Special shapes and colors. Piece after piece. Nothing really struck me as too exceptional, aside from the extraordinary fact that what I was holding was once part of ancient trees. Mind-boggling. But I was looking for something I didn't find on that table.

But then at the next display shelf, the agates were arrayed before me, beaufiul and polished agates. Lots of spectacular colors -- purples and crimson and lavenders. Their shiny surfaces gleamed in the store's special lighting . I was absorbed in these agates, not knowing too much about them, but intrigued.

Then, I saw what I later discovered were geodes. Ordinary round rocks, incredibly hard, but cut in two and hollow with crystals inside. After the initial shock of seeing something so incredibly beautiful and strange, and which triggered long-ago memories of looking at these types of rocks when I was a child, I knew that one of them would be coming home with me that night.

Sure enough. There is was. It was different from the others. I peered into the narrow opening and there beheld a miniature cavern, the roof and sides of which were covered with the most delicate and sparkling crystals. They glittered in the light when I later used my flashlight to illumine the interior.

My nephew and the others were not too impressed with my purchase. Or they didn't seem to be anyway.

"It's a magic cave. It opens into another world," I said to the 9-year-old boy, wondering what his reaction to my adult foolishness would be.

"Yeah, right," he replied.

Well, think what you want, I said to myself, amused that one so young would not appreciate what I had just said and discovered.

But what on earth was I t alking about? It's not such a mystery.

It's 4 am as I write this, and I am staring at the opening to my geode's little cavern. Where is my flashlight and magnifying glass? I think I'll step inside my crystal cave tonight.

Wind in the trees

Sitting here under a holly tree at the nature preserve, listening to the wind blowing in the tops of still-winter bare trees in this stretch of forest near the cypress swamp. The swamp maples are budding and there is Spring in the air, but Winter in the cold wind's embrace as I walked past what were once flourishing rice fields centuries ago in this part of the South Carolina lowcountry. The wind blows strong and cold in the huge expanse of marsh and dikes I just traversed. It was so nice to feel the bracing cold air, to look up into the blue skies, and to feel close to the Earth on this early March Sunday morning.

I just heard a train whistle in the distance. Birds are chirping and peeping in a nearby tree. The trail is taking me through upland maritime forest now, on slightly higher ground than the marshes and swamp bottoms filled with cypress trees. This upland forest contains oaks, hollies, sweet gum and a few hickories and oak chestnuts.

I feel the familiar pull of Nature and the beckoning call to enter into both the solitude that resides here and companionship with the living things of the Earth where the cycles and rhythms of land and seasons speak to me so personally and eloquently.

The only sounds now are the wind rustling the trees and squirrels stirring up leaves on the forst floor. Many of the oaks in these forests retain their canopies until this time of year, when, as with the live oaks, they shed their leaves at last in preparation for the new growth of Spring.

How I need and treasure these restorative woods and this wind that sings in the trees and shuts out the sounds of civilization in the distance.

(Written March 4)

Among the ancient trees

I am sitting on my favorite bench, underneath live oaks at the state park, enjoying a cool breeze and thinking about my hike last Saturday at Congaree National Park near Columbia.

As I left Charleston on a beautiful and mild morning, I could not wait to get on the first open stretch of country road. The traffic and ceaseless energy and movement in the city oppress me somtimes, and it was with great relief that after a half hour's drive I was at last traveling along the Old Charleston Highway (U.S. 176) toward Columbia. Once off that road, I passed the towns of Eutawville, Santee and Elloree. A mile or so outside Elloree, I turned right on state route 267, and knew I was, for certain, way out in the country. I love the feeling of open space, farms, fields and woods.

Thirty minutes later I was turning onto Old Bluff Road, not far from the town of Gadsden, toward the visitor center and trails of the national park. The main trail begins next to a huge American beech tree, which, just this past December when I was there, was still arrayed in its golden yellow Autumn colors.

Entering and retreating into the silence of this majestic old-growth bottomland swamp forest, I soon was looking up to the tops of loblolly pines 160 tall, some of the highest in the country. Tall cypress, tupelo and a variety of oaks and other hardwoods, some state and national champion trees, made me pause in wonder and gratitude. I never cease to be astounded by the ethereal stillness and beauty of this wilderness, 30,000 acres of it along the muddy Congaree River, formed by the confluence of the Broad and Saluda rivers at Columbia.

I passed a lot of people on that perfect late winter/early spring day -- groups of friends, couples, families with children -- all absorbed in the enchantment of the place. Some I greeted, but most just seemed to be absorbed in their moments in the park, not looking at me as I passed them or sat on a bench, gazing up into silhouetted winter trees with a lowering sun lightiing up the forest in back of them. It didn't bother me, this passage of strangers I will never see again, but in a sense it did make me more aware that I was one of the only lone pilgrims in what to me is a sacred natural place. I felt a calm and peace that allowed me to savor this aloneness, not feeling lonely but feeling at one with the elements -- the tall trees, the wind, the water filled cypress sloughs with their shadows. Time stands still in this great park. One enters and leaves with reverence.

Written Feb. 27, 2007

Congaree National Park Web Site

The world I grew up in

(A reminiscence written before Hurricane Katrina changed New Orleans forever)

When I was a teenager growing up in New Orleans, I was not insulated from the shocks to my young sensibility afforded on every turn by trips from the suburbs into the big, bad city. From an early age, I had been affected by all of the strange, terrible and depressing sights one could see along the streets of the downtown business district, the adjacent French Quarter, and along the riverfront. I would make forays into this urban jungle by bus when I was old enough to do so by myself, and I'd be drawn to and riveted by every tragic specimen of the human race I passed. Although I didn't exactly comprehend what homelessness meant, as well as all its various sociological implications, as a 13 or 14-year-old I was unusually and grimly attentive to the lines of disheveled men lined up for meals and a cot at the Ozanam Inn on Camp Street. This was New Orleans' own Skid Row. How mortified I was, coming from my comfortable middle-class existence, to have to be confronted by this horrible aberration in the normal order of things.

Once on Canal Street, I'd hasten quickly to my destination, usually Maison Blanche Department Store or a bookstore, and try to avert my gaze from the beggars and limbless men in wheelchairs, shaking their tin cups. I saw the mentally ill alcoholics and occasionally heard their insane rantings. I was scared and repelled. This was part of life in a big city. I hated it. It depressed me terribly. I'd come home from breathing bus exhaust fumes and listening to horns honking and dodging crowds of people with a dull headache and a psychic knot in my soul. Why was I so affected by these sights and sounds? Other kids my age didn't seem to be bothered. They probably thought it was funny. But me, I would wonder, "What if that ever happened to me, if I was out on the streets with no place to go?" I imagined all kind of scenarios as to how the homeless men ended up on that deadly, blighted street with the empty buildings and broken glass. It made no sense. Was there any hope for them? What did they think as they stood in lines for soup and a sandwich?

New Orleans affected me this way when I was young. It was, and is, one of the poorest urban areas in the country, at the bottom. It contains massive housing projects and a welfare-dependent population. What contrasts between the upscale Garden District and university areas of the city with their mansions, beautiful old trees, and parks and the vast, low-income areas. This dichotomy between the rich and the poor always struck me as absurd and unjust. But New Orleans is a city of contrasts and always has been. It was built on the wealth of the slave economy in the South that yielded its up its bountiful cotton crops as bales of cargo for the steamboats making their way down the Mississippi to the old port city. It was founded on a malarial, flood-prone cypress swamp on a bend in the river where no city should ever have been built. Its history and culture are fascinating and weird beyond belief.

Here are some observations I made in a journal entry from Nov. 1, 1971. I was a 20-year old college sophomore, living on campus at the lakefront, attending the University of New Orleans:

Last Friday I rode the Elysian Fields bus downtown to meet my father and realized again how this bus route slices its way through just about every conceivable cultural zone of New Orleans, from the exclusive Lakefront area to the forlorn decay abundant in the regions of St. Claude and Esplanade avenues. One can see poor blacks and poor whites in close, yet fragile proximity, bound by the common ties of indefinite entrapment within crumbling neighborhoods. Traffic streams down Elysian Fields [the irony of this name should never be lost on the observer of the street scene in New Orleans] incessantly, and inhabitants of the old buildings, which are strung together nearly unbroken through zone after zone of ethnic groups, pass just as continuously along the glass-filled, cracked sidewalks. My gaze is riveted to the many people I spot in quick succession, mostly old women or young mothers, sitting on porches or stoops, watching as their neighbors trod unconcernedly by or their grandchildren or children pull wagons or ride bicycles in front of their houses. They have for a front yard a choked traffic artery and are probably desensitized to the perpetual noise.

Common sights are signs on the fronts of buildings announcing, "Furnished apartment for rent." Several blocks form a perfectly typical running narrative of urban life, starting with an oyster bar, old apartments, a funeral home of grotesque but commmercially appealing architecture, and more old apartments which rent out to anyone for $8 -$10 a week. Whenever passing one of these in particular, I always spot several old men and one or two rapidly aging young men, rocking passively in their chairs, or leaning with arms folded over the concrete ledges of second floor balconies looking out at the traffic and just staring with extremely tragic, hopeless expressions on their faces...

As I mentioned, these fragments of city life affected me deeply from an early age. I look back on this entry these 35 years later and know, for one thing, that I am glad I don't live in that city anymore, but at the same time I feel a kind of sadness, from the perspective of many years having passed, that I was so unhappy at so many points in my youth. At the same time, although I experienced much unhappiness, I also came from there. I grew up there. It was once my home. For that reason, I will, from time to time, look back on those beginnings and my growing up experiences in the "City That Care Forgot."

I had a brief flowering of childhood and then it seemed to be over. I guess I saw myself as more adult than teenager. I wasn't like my peers. I was too serious. My journal entries from those college years reflect that.

Books

I have always loved books and read them all my life. When I was 12 years old, I joined the Doubleday $1 Book Club, or maybe it was the Bargain Book Club, I can't remember for sure. I was so excited when my first shipment of books came (those five books for $1 introductory offers are very enticing). I had a nice book shelf in my bedroom and placed my new tomes on the shelves and added to them as I got new books. Not that I read many of them. How many 13-year-olds can get into Bruce Catton's three volume history of the Civil War? But I got it for a dollar I believe.

It was around this time that my love of buying books really took off. Later when the malls first opened in the 60s, I would head over to Waldenbooks with some frequency, amazed at the selection.

In the years to come I would read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughts science fiction ( John Carter of Mars, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, and the like.. eeek). How can I even remember the titles? I went through them very quickly.. In junior high and high school I faithfully read all the assigned plays and novels.

In my senior year of college, I discovered a special sancutary of an independent bookstore, located in five rooms of an old house in the Garden District of New Orleans. The owner and founder was a remakrable woman who presided over her eclectic little book emporium with the all-wise air of a very well-read and knowledgeable person. She was like a seer or sage to me. I marveled just to think of all the books she had read and all the noted authors she had met and spoken to. I spent many happy hours browsing the shelves in one room after another, walking across creaky old wood floors and cooled on hot summer days by a couple of noisy window air-conditioning units.

A few years later, and for much fo the 70s, I frequented a marvelous independent bookstore in Columbia, S.C., where I lived for much of that decade. It was called "The Happy Bookseller" and was evidently the cherished dream of a successful carpet dealer in that city who loved books with a passion I still recall with astonishment. Everyone he hired had that same passion for books and knowledge of them.

Years ago, I dreamed of having a book store myself, and there was a litle shop on Magazine Street in New Orleans that served as a model of what a good book store would be like. This was in the 1980s when I briefly lived in New Orleans, the city where I grew up. Now, I go to Barnes and Noble and Books a Million, which are very nice, but not the same as the quirky independent bookstores I loved to visit, just for the experience if not to buy something.

And, I must confess...Now that so much of my reading is one on the Internet, a virtual cornucopia of magazine articles, journal articles, Web sites, diaries, instant messaging and the like, my reading of books has suffered as a result. My goal is to achieve some balance, spending equal amounts of time with books and the many magazines I subscribe to, and online reading. It's a daunting task, but I have so many hundreds of books waiting on me, I cannot fail in my quest.

This is a survey I completed a while back, but it forms a perfect snapshot of where I was in my bookbuying history and in what direction I am likely to go in the future.:

How many books do you own?

At least 1,000. They fill all my shelves in three rooms of my apartment and are stacked on the floor in each room, also. Boxes of books line some of my walls, and they fill my walk-in closets.

What is the last book you bought?

I picked it up tonight at Barnes and Noble. It's titled "Fried Chicken: An American Story", by John T. Edge. It is full of choice stories and the history of my all time favorite food, plus recipes. Not that I cook my own fried chicken. I have so many pleasant memories of savoring really good fried chicken, whether the kind my mother made when I was a child or my aunt's cook prepared for us when we went to Sumter on vacation. I love it at barbecue buffets, at chicken restaurants such as Popeyes, and, really anywhere it is sold.

Five books I have bought in the past few weeks (I buy many used books):

The Education of an American by Mark Sullivan ("A famous journalist, author of Our Times, reviews the forces which shaped his life."

The World's Great Letters

The Beauty of America: Our Heritage and Destiny in Great Words and Photographs

Vermont People (photographs by Peter Miller)

American Ruins, Ghosts on the Landscape (photographs by Maxwell MacKenzie)

Montana: Photography by John Lambing and Wayne Mumford

Books I am currently reading:

Living on Wilderness Time by Melissa Walker

Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror by James Wolcott

Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture by David Gross

The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves by Curtis White

Watching the Tree: A Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Tradition, and Spiritual Wisdom


Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal -- The Art of Transforming a Life into Stories by Alexandra Johnson

Going to Ground: Simple Life on a Georgia Pond by Amy Blackmarr

Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communites in the Internet Age by Mary Chayko

Five books I have long remembered:

Cousin Pons by Honore Balzac -- One of the most moving and astonishing novels by the great French novelist. I will never forget it. I read it right after I graduated from college in 1973.

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton and The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton -- these books profoundly influenced me during a period of spiritual awakening in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole -- Probably the funniest novel ever written. A sprawling saga about the life of one Ignatius Riley as he confronts the absurdities of life. Set in New Orleans, where I grew up. (the only novel I have read three times).

Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson -- I remember this book from ninth grade and how mysterious and exotic it was.