- Not too comfortable

This week I audited a lecture given by the lead professor of a big mechanical engineering course that I’m involved in, modestly. I was there to signal my interest and get some information on an upcoming assignment.
At some point, the students were prompted to draw a human-powered hovercraft. I was sitting next to another [...]

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- Joy of the pain

Yesterday I took Eli, pal Cody, and Grace to Savers.  Cody claims it’s better than Goodwill, because everything hangs on racks in sizes.  And, indeed, it does.  Eli found a shirt, Cody two of them, and I got a pair of Ann Taylor cords and Old Navy canvas pants, $6.99 each, preworn and prewashed.  Grace [...]

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- Parallel play

It’s heaven to lose yourself in the company of others. In this instance, I’m thinking of Saturday afternoon in the Kind Cafe in Selinsgrove, PA with fellow writers James Black and Jimmy Guterman. For an hour, we sat together, ignored each other, and wrote. For me, it was utter peace, focus, and fellowship.
The [...]

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- Last beach day

August 31, 2008.  Cold Storage Beach, East Dennis.
Verbatim:
“It’s Michael Krantz’s birthday,” Jimmy says when I ask him the date.
The family near us has a boy about Grace’s age with the same insulin pump as mine.  I talk to the mother.  Among many interesting things, she tells me about Cheating Destiny, and parts about history of [...]

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- Postcard to me

On the evening ferry from Oak Bluffs back to Hyannis, I finished reading the last few pages of the book I had brought along, and then I completed a chronological list of the little events that had comprised my day.
Next to me sat a couple with their two young children. The little girl — [...]

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- Conservation

If you ever accidentally dump a bottle of water into your purse or bag, as I’ve absentmindedly done a few times and Grace unwittingly did yesterday, and a notebook gets drenched, take heart: It is possible to save your writing, if not the paper itself.

Gently tear the wet pages away from the binding, and lay [...]

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- A day’s notes

Here are the scraps I collected on Thursday, February 28th.
1. From the viewing deck at the pool, during the swim team rally, I can look over the coach’s shoulder and see the words she has printed out in these colors on a sheet of white office paper:
FAST
SMOOTH
HUNGRY
STRONG
2. In the locker room, I come [...]

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- Future man of letters?

Scene: outside kindergarten wing today, 2 p.m.  Woman walking with a child who is not her own.
George: Jane, are you going to my brother’s Bar Mitzvah tomorrow? 
Jane: Yes.
George: Would you take notes for me?
Jane: Mmm, okay.  (pause)  Why?
George:  Because I want to tell my teacher all about it on Monday, and my mother is going [...]

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- For your eyes only

Bound diaries and journals have not always been secured by a padlock or hidden between the boxspring and mattress. Thoreau and his Transcendentalist friends, in fact, often wrote them with the knowledge that they would be read, whether in their lifetimes or posthumously.
According to an article in the local Brookline TAB this week (11.1.07), [...]

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- Oh, to draw!

Today I’m wishing that my black notebooks — full of penciled words, notes to self, lists, names of books, phone numbers for contractors, half-baked ideas, found language, beginnings, and occasionally the pressed leaf of a plant I come across and want to remember — contained one thing as lovely as this:

“Autumn” by Mattias Adolfsson, http://mattiasa.blogspot.com
See [...]

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