my Blog

I bought organic bananas recently at Trader Joe’s and at New Seasons. The ones from Trader Joe’s are from Mexico; the ones from New Seasons came from Ecuador. The sandwich bread I eat each day was baked in California. (I live in Oregon.) The vegan cheese I like to put...

On the sidewalk outside New Seasons grocery store sat a man with leather-like skin, his cheeks and mouth a maze of wrinkles, leaning against his backpack. His crude cardboard sign said “Anything helps” on one side “Do something kind” on the other. The sign was fairly...

Growing up in the sixties and seventies, I loved pop music, but my stepdad, a big band musician who had entertained presidents, detested rock and roll. He explained why the music I liked was bad music. Besides being too loud, it was too simple. It lacked depth and...

Sometimes I feel like we’re living in the End Times. When I was a child and a teen in the 1960s and ‘70s, I encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jesus freaks who insisted that the time was nigh. I vaguely figured that, if they were right, human existence would come to...

Here is how I went slightly out of my way recently to accept a small gesture of kindness. I had just bought a little chocolate fudge cupcake at the cupcake shop next to my bank. A postal worker, toting his sack, bought a cupcake right after I did. I thought he looked...

I was going through a little rough patch emotionally. My friend and I were enumerating all our blessings, so that we would remember and so that I could keep my own little troubles in context. We covered the usual and the most obvious blessings: access to drinkable...

Something else deep. I was riding the bus one evening and suddenly a bunch of texts started coming in fast and furious from two different friends – intense and upsetting for completely different reasons. So I was sucked into two simultaneous texting conversations,...