This morning, half an hour before sunrise, I heard two mourning doves: one across the street, calling from the neighbor’s fir tree; the other on the street south of ours, from the dense pine in front of a house sold a year or two ago by the elderly couple who used to live there. Early morning. Birds. Trees. And so the note I wrote August 1, 2018, already has that […]
The dictionary in question is Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, published by G. & C. Merriam Company in 1924. It weighs just under fifteen pounds; the front cover is frayed and attached by only a few threads. I’ve since acquired older dictionaries, published early in the nineteenth century, in English and Spanish, and others of a more recent date, in French and German. Armenian, Japanese, and Russian […]
There is the news, there is social media, and there is the real world. In the real world, in a so-called conservative area, one can attend a grandchild’s basketball game and scarcely see what some people desperately believe is a “white person.” The crowd of parents and grandparents are a beautiful mixture of ethnic backgrounds, of shades, colors, and features; and their children and grandchildren run back and forth and […]
The morning was spent in the company of a roofer, in pursuit of a leak we noticed in time last night to prevent damage to our old upright piano. Luckily, only a little water landed on a paperback containing the poems of Ezra Pound, leaving the young Ezra with a gentle wave in his hair. Had the water reached the Jonathan Swift set from 1812 and 1813, I — but […]
William Michaelian 