What can one say of a life that is reduced to news of the right foot?  That it is a disabled life, of course, 'my left foot' providing title and focus for some of the best writing about disability.  So don't apologize, I tell myself, and keep your eye on the arch.BBC Radio 3 has been broadcasting talks from its November symposium on, more or less, The Future of Everything.  Jane and I were listening just the other day to the quite courageous and remarkable Anglican official who refused Read more [...]

Putting my best foot forward, that is the thing, and how this was accomplished just last night is anyone's guess.  But it is true enough, this thing about my foot, how it has been cramping, keeping me awake, until last night.  This welcome news has to do with the physiologically disturbing effects of travel, I am certain.  Nothing like a little sojourn in Arizona to get one surprisingly dehydrated...followed by a program of water ingestion yesterday evening, followed by a night without Read more [...]

It is that time of year.  It has dawned on me...although this is hardly the right expression.  The night has advanced into the afternoon, evening now much like the black construction paper that materialized around grade school Halloweens.  It is cold, this is part of what's happening.  There is hardly any cold in the central Californian cold, I concede this.  Still, there is enough of it to force one away from the windows.  Particularly mine, single-pane glass dating Read more [...]

Things were very confused round about August, 1969.  I had come to Britain for a short-term visit.  How long could the thing last, after all, but a few months?  I had traveled about the Continent.  And now there was this confusion about my going home.  Was I going or was I staying?  The latter had seemed preposterous only a few weeks before.  But somehow I already had London connections, family connections of all things...unexpected and baffling.  And as though Read more [...]

It has been the Addled Era, a time of being consistently disturbed and off base, my thoughts corkscrewing around nothing and everything.  Take the garden.  There is something happening there, and having to do the simplest Archimedean principles of volume and displacement, and yet the whole thing obsesses me.  I take pride in having brought to a halt, more or less, the grinding and flushing of kitchen scraps down the sink, a.k.a., garbage disposal.  For a year or more virtually Read more [...]

One can put too fine a point on the concept of the 'haunted house.'  The old place my father bought in the center of a small desert town certainly had the weight of years about it.  It also had the weight of the future about it.  For after his divorce, my father told me that he had been planning for this all along.  His office downstairs, living accommodation upstairs.  At the time, this seemed to me very adult and prescient.  Now the arrangement appears defeatist and Read more [...]