Writing Life

Last Friday Julie and I took in an exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco called “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs.” Julie had seen the King Tut exhibition during its last trip to San Francisco in 1979, but this was my first exposure to the burial treasures of Egypt’s most famous ruler. When his tomb was opened in 1922, by amateur archeologist Howard Carter, its four chambers (annex, antechamber, burial chamber, and treasury) were found to contain 5,398 separate items, from tiny trinkets to massive shrines. I have seen faux Pharoahnic treasures in movies all my life. Thus, before the entering the show, I had a clear idea of what King Tut’s treasures would look like – lots of solid gold objects, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, silver, and so forth. I also had a fairly clear idea of what the interior of Tut’s tomb must have looked like when it was first discovered by Carter and his team – a series of vast underground chambers below whose high vaulted ceilings massive piles of precious jewels and other treasures sparkled in the light of countless oil lamps affixed sconce-like to the walls. But both the treasures of the tomb and the tomb itself were not at all what I imagined they would be. Read the rest of this entry »

When my grandchildren were younger, I used to entertain them with a game called What Would You Do? The premise of the game was simple. I made up a question and then provided them with three (or more) answers to choose from. The questions were sometimes silly, sometimes grisly (to appeal to their childhood love of all things scary), and almost always far-fetched. But the answers a child selected often revealed something interesting about her personality. Some grandkids usually made the safest choice. Some usually made the riskiest choice. The answers of some kids seemed to be random. Others vacillated back and forth between the safe choice and the risky choice depending upon the specifics of the situation. Some kids mulled their options carefully before answering. Some blurted out a response almost before I could recite all the options available to them. Not every question had a safe answer, a risky answer, and a middle-of-the-road answer. Some just gauged a child’s favorite type of food, favorite color, favorite sport, or favorite type of wearing apparel. Particularly interesting, were the explanations the kids came up with to justify their choices. What’s more, I never objected when a child chose to reject all my options and provide a wholly original answer to my question. Whenever I posed a lot of these questions to a child, I would begin to see (or think I saw) a pattern emerging from their answers. Who knows, maybe the game says more about me than it does about my grandkids. At any rate, Julie and I are leaving town for three days. I won’t be able to post any blog entries until Monday, February 8. To keep you entertained until then, I have put together a selection of questions from my What Would You Do? game. Feel free to answer them yourself or to try them out on a child who you think you’d like to get to know a little better. Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer I published a column in Inside the City called “How To Have A Cast-Iron Marriage.” In it, I discussed how my father-in-law instilled in my wife a lifelong devotion to cast-iron cookware. I also noted that the rules for preserving your cast-iron pots and pans can, with a few minor adjustments, be applied to the preserving of a marriage. The column generated more responses from readers than any other I have written. Read the rest of this entry »

I begin every morning by drinking a fruit smoothie made of fresh and frozen fruits mixed together in my blender. Two and a half years ago, on my 49th birthday, I woke up, staggered into the kitchen, and reached into a cupboard for a smoothie glass. As I withdrew my hand from the cupboard, I bumped my arm and lost control of the glass, which fell into the sink and shattered into a dozen or more pieces. I am not by nature superstitious, but as I stared into the sink at all those jagged shards, I thought to myself, “That can’t be a good sign.” Read the rest of this entry »

Several years ago, my first published short story appeared in a magazine called the Chattahoochee Literary Review. When my contributor’s copy arrived in the mail, I flipped forward to the table of contents, to see if the names of any famous writers were listed there along with mine. Alas, all of the other contributors were unknowns like me. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, for the first time ever, I visited a book mall. The mall is called Booktown Books and is located in Grass Valley, California, about an hour’s drive from Sacramento. I have visited hundreds of bookstores, but this was a unique experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Julie and I went out on the road in search of antiques. We don’t have a lot of money to spend on antiques these days, but we still like to look at them. Our interests are numerous, so we can usually find something to interest us at even the tiniest, least impressive antiques stores (and, by the way, tiny-ness is rarely an indication of an antiques store’s merit; plenty of excellent antique shops, like Nevada City’s Main Street Antiques, aren’t much larger than the average American living room). Among the things we like to collect (or would like to collect, if we had the money) are vintage advertising posters, old clocks, figural bronze, original oil paintings, half dolls, Steiff animals, Maxfield Parrish prints, vintage cast-iron cookware, globes, maps, anything art deco, California tile-top furniture, ocean liner memorabilia, handwritten letters and diaries, Arabiana and Persiana, old books of various genres (travel, exploration, poetry, fiction, history, cooking, biography, etc.), and postcards. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent the day in Arabistan, a book by William Perry Fogg, a 19th Century adventurer and travel writer. The full title is Arabistan, Or The Land of the Arabian Nights. It was published in 1875 in a beautiful cloth-bound edition. I bought my copy recently from a Nevada City antiquarian bookstore. Fogg, according to some reports, was the inspiration for Phileas Fogg, the fictional hero of Jules Verne’s novel Around The World In Eighty Days. Nowadays it’s only the fictional Fogg that anyone remembers, but the factual Fogg was fascinating in his own right. Read the rest of this entry »

My column in the February edition of Inside The City, which arrived in my mail today, deals in part with my longtime fascination with world globes. Below is a sort of prosy narrative poem about the origins of my globe fetish. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I wrote here about my Uncle Alec, who died on Friday at the age of 68. An hour ago my wife asked me, “What are you going to write about tonight?” “I don’t know,” I answered, “But I hope it’s not another farewell to a deceased relative or friend.” Then I went online and discovered that a friend, of sorts, had just died. Read the rest of this entry »