“It looks like something your ashes might be put in.” Carol was considering her placement of the very lovely wine box, woodburned with my full name and new brand logo, a gift from my relaunched blog’s website designer. Carol was viewing the whole picture: the coffinlike wine box she had placed above the orange […]

   I turned the corner during my morning jog, already lost in a spirited dialog with my chosen, invisible nemesis running partner. Across the street I noticed a cyclist gesturing with one hand and then the other, presumably to a nemesis partner of her own. There we were, the four of us out for our […]

   The last time my thumb was out was to indicate to the waitress that the eggplant parm was for Carol. Prior to that, you’d have to go back almost 50 years to the shoulder of Highway 90 just outside New Orleans, where the thumb of a freshly graduated college boy was outstretched alongside a […]

Here’s an example of one of my earliest icebreaker/pickup lines. See if you can see what it might have foretold of my future as a “player.” I was working at my first job in a snowball shop. I had my back turned to the window. And when I turned I was startled to see two […]

I had an idea for a blog the other day. It arrived with the clarity and completeness that I’ve come to recognize as “serviceable.” That’s the midrange of the ideas that I get. There’s the ones that come with the blaze of divine inspiration and strike with the suddenness of an attack of sciatica. And […]

Carol and I have spent our first (and only we hope) Thanksgiving together without surrounding ourselves with family, either mine or hers. Instead we celebrated alone, in a small cabin located in a quiet, secluded hollow in the shadow of Yosemite National Park

With both our families either being isolated or atomized in different locations because of the pandemic, putting the thanks in Thanksgiving might have seemed a threadbare task this season. But Carol found a sweet little cabin near the recently renamed Yo Semite! National Park that promised a more positive spin on the phrase “cabin fever” at the start of this inaugural Covid-19 Holiday Season.

As the Paris portion of our first trip together ended, it was already clear Carol and I were well-matched as traveling companions. And by this I mean, Carol is the polar opposite of the flake that I am. She’d made peace with my OCD approach to train schedules, and had gently nudged me toward finding […]

The one drain plug in this whole footloose, carefree and otherwise leaf blown approach to travel I outlined earlier presents itself when it comes to scheduled departures. Whether it’s planes, trains, busses or river ferries, the posted schedule has the same play on my neuroses pertaining to time as melting ice packs have for climate scientists.

At the time Carol and I took off for our first European trip together, I had completed two solo journeys of my own during my year of widowhood. I had not traveled solo since my vagabonding days of the early 1970s, and I immediately experienced the true “freedom of the road” again that traveling alone […]