“Sola now muborak [sic],” I remembered, from a napkin-scrawled note on a workday in Arlington, Virginia, mid-1980s. Dr. Latifi was...

Ralph Waldo Emerson called them “incidental friends.” Our community of acquaintances – neighbors you don’t know all that well, but wave...

Last week, after visiting friends and family in California -- few days in Bay Area, few days in San Diego, with glorious, low-humidity...

Even as a 2nd-grader, I understood that 1) without a dead body, there would be no ritual of shared grief. No funeral, at a church or...

Clarence, my longtime 6-stringed companion, has aided and abetted some of my strangest inexplicable moments. I’m not sure if holding his...

‘If the guy sitting next to me takes out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco – especially cherry-flavored – I will crawl under this table and...

Have you ever seen a ‘lenticular’ picture, where multiple images integrate into one surface, so the subject seems to move, when you look...

Sometimes, moments from incongruent eras of your life arise and collide, and make you snort a beverage right out of your nose. This...

We’re having a yard sale! Early June. I asked my nearest (human) neighbors about it and they’re up for a multi-family, corner...

UPDATE, late June 2021, as promised: It's almost quiet again, humming-in-the-trees-wise, 17-year-cycle-wise. The carcasses of emerged...

8 or 9 years ago, I stopped at a Safeway on a Sunday afternoon in May. A few yards inside the sliding-door entrance, a young female...

As off-balance as I felt in March 2020 by not leaving the house and working from my kitchen, I’m anxious in new ways about returning to...

[adding on 10-11-21, a long-buried Polaroid pic of baby Roger in my lap, that I think Patty took; this would have been 1983] [original...

Part 2 after https://www.marymuffindonovan.com/post/of-flying-sandwiches-and-sensory-life-part-1-4-21-21 Dreaming that my teeth started...

Music, an easy one; the first few measures of the Overture from “Carousel,” one of thousands, for me. Food grilling, on the breeze from...

Last night, both April Fool’s and Holy Thursday of the Last Supper in the religion of my youth, several ambulances screamed past my car. ...

In the mid-‘80s, my guitar, Clarence, and I opened for a comedian in Charlottesville, VA. My law-school roommates and I had seen him on...

I don’t know how to blog. This is clear to me, 2 months into the idea. It was an idea. Born of a lifelong impulse to express, to share,...

Part of my job in medical education is to orient students for ‘experiential’ exams. Each student will soon talk to a real person --...

Sometimes I talk to the children I did not have. And sometimes I can hear them, too. It’s a bit mysterious. I have (alive) children to...