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That Lazy Old Alligator Mr. Time

Talk

My father brought Jake’s body home from Colorado in a record-breaking blizzard.

Hella Hammid

I’d asked Hella to send me more photographs. Months later she wrote back, apologizing for the delay. “I have looked death squarely in the face most of last year,” she said. “I have cancer but am fighting it with everything I’ve got. This is why I haven’t come up with new work, but I’ll begin again soon.”

Blood For Oil

June 1992

The Map I Was Promised

Things I didn’t get to last week: answering the mail, giving up coffee, saving the planet.

Living Simply

At fifty-five, I look back on a life so complicated that had I set out to make things hard for myself, I couldn’t have done a better job.

The Carrion Heart

He came in on a royal blue 1928 Studebaker, the engine rattling, leaving a dusty cloud billowing into the desert air.

Mother

Having to choose, clutching a doll, finding it hard to say goodbye

Reopening The Wound

Reflections On Oliver Stone’s JFK

I’ve never been as strongly affected by a movie as I was by Oliver Stone’s JFK. Although Stone takes artistic liberties in weaving together the disturbing facts surrounding Kennedy’s assassination and its subsequent investigation, I found his central thesis — that Kennedy’s death was part of a well-orchestrated plot reaching into the highest levels of our government — not only plausible, but compelling.

The Value Of Trees

The Pacific crashes into mountains here, with no introductory foothills, few beaches. Highway 1, the only north-west road in Big Sur, dips and swerves like a roller coaster. First you’re flying up in the redwoods, breathing eucalyptus and fog; straight below are tiny coves and river mouths. It’s a descent you feel in your stomach. Then you’re skimming along the beach under a kaleidoscope of sea gulls.