About Me

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Since 1984, my light commentary, Marginal Considerations, has been a feature of Weekend Radio. Moving into the 21st century (yeah, I know - a decade late and more than a dollar short), it may be time to explore the format known as "the blog." (Still on the radio, BTW.) I am the author of A Natural History of Socks, illustrated by the late Eric May, You May Already Be a Winner (and other marginal considerations) and The Nonexistence of Rutabagas, plus maybe 1K features, essays, book and arts reviews in newspapers and magazines nearly everywhere, except perhaps Kansas. I live on Lake Erie one city to the west of Cleveland with too many musical instruments, several large plants and no cats. My front door is purple. I collect dust, take up space and burn fossil fuel. I kayak, knit, hike, sing, canoe, write choral music and play hammered dulcimer, but not all at the same time. I read too much and don't write enough, but what's new?

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Reason enough

"Walk with your eyes down and you will be less likely to stub your toe, but you will have no reason to go anywhere."

My reason to go somewhere was simply a relatively cool and comfortable morning. I did not stub my toe, but I kicked a metal trash can lid. I caught the edge of it with my foot because I was walking not with my eyes down but sideways. I was looking at the flower boxes on a nearby porch railing instead of watching where I was going.

The boxes were filed with the ubiquitous impatiens, unremarkable except for their particularly deep shade of pink. In among the impatiens were equally unremarkable geraniums but geraniums of an even deeper edging-toward-fuchsia pink.  I was marveling at the colors when the trash can lid and my sneaker connected.

The lid landed on the sidewalk, clanging like a Chinese gong. At least twenty kids from all parts of the block turned and stared at me. They were out in force, playing away one of the last days before school starts again. I walked on, pretending I had no connection with the noise.

My friend Glenn once told me that when you stub your toe, trip over something or bump into anything, you are supposed to pointedly look back at it as if questioning its right to be in your way. This advice was gleaned from an intro-to-acting class he took in college. I'm guessing that more than anything else, it's a technique to get a small laugh out of a klutz move. I don't know, but I did not look back.

I just kept walking, walking through a morning that was reason enough to go anywhere, walking, walking and turning the great ball of the earth around and around with my feet.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Seven going on 32

Stories about one's grandkids tend to be a bloody bore. I rarely regale folks with such. Neither do I whip out a supersized accordion of kiddie pics at every turn. I don't need to do that; I have enough other ways to annoy people. But these anecdotes are about someone else's granddaughter, which I have decided is allowable. Plus, this child is just such a hoot, I must share just a few of many, many Sophia stories.

As Sophia (the child in question) was playing with a toy cell phone, my friend (this child's grandmother) tried to play along, asking "Sophia, who are you calling?" The kid rolled her eyes and said with great exasperation, "Grandma, I'm not calling anyone. I'm texting my boyfriend!"

Same Grandma was down for the count with a back injury. Her daughter and the kids came over to see how she was doing. Ever solicitous, Sophia cooed, "Oh, Grandma, is there anything I can do for you?" Jean, aka Grandma, asked for a glass of water, just to give the kid something to do. Sophia fetched it, brought it to the living room and handed it to Jean. Then striking a superhero pose, one hand on her hip, the other raised in the air, Sophia proclaimed, "My work here is done!" You could almost see her cape streaming behind her in the wind.

Sophia was four and five, respectively, in those scenes. She is now a sophisticated seven. Eating lunch at Panera (her favorite - she always orders the Greek salad and green tea), Sophia, her older brother and grandmother were discussing what movie to go see. Smurfs, the current kid flick, was quickly dismissed as too immature. "How about the Harry Potter," her brother suggested?

"Forget it," Sophia said. "My boat doesn't even leave the dock for Harry Potter."

Makes me wonder how she feels about George Clooney.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Optimistic pessimism

Picture an 8 oz. glass containing 4 oz. of liquid. (My 4 oz. is red wine. Yours can be whatever you like - your choice.) Now, to an optimist, that glass is half full, to a pessimist, it's half empty. You know that. To an engineer the glass is twice as big as it needs to be but, as usual, I digress.

Pessimism gets a bad rap. I mean, nobody ever wrote a best-seller titled The Power of Negative Thinking. Maybe that's because optimism gets all the theme songs - "Keep On the Sunny Side," "Whistle a Happy Tune," "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." Lousy advice, I say.

Optimists expect everything to go right. They believe projects will come in on time and on budget. They expect decent weather when on vacation. They even believe contractors' estimates and airline schedules, poor dears. Naturally, they're almost always disappointed.

Whatever the circumstance or endeavor, rarely does everything go right. Optimism just sets you up to have your hopes dashed.

On the other hand, rarely does absolutely everything go wrong. If you expect the worst, even if 97% of your day tanks, the 3% that turns out OK will come as a pleasant surprise. Cultivating total gloom and doom leaves you the possibility of a better outcome than anticipated every single time. See how it works? Obviously, of the two, pessimism is the saner choice.

Of course, I don't expect any of you to share my opinion. In fact, if I get even one comment or email agreeing with me on this, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Between July and September


OK, It’s hardly perfect, but of the selection of months currently in stock, August is one of the better models.


August weather, for example, is a paragon of reliability. Unlike such fickle months as April and November, August offers consistency. It’s hot. Sometimes hot and dry, more often hot and humid, but predictably hot. This provides an excuse for lethargy that at other times of the year would be taken for mere sloth.


A late entry in the annual lineup, August didn’t join the calendar club until 46 B.C. I figure it arrived several centuries after the other months because, like us during August, it just didn’t move very fast.


Along with July, August nestled in at the end of the summer. Before everything was settled, Augustus, with typical imperiousness, swiped a day from poor February and tacked it on the end of his namesake so as not to be out-done by the other Caesar’s month.


August is a gift of time. It’s too late to initiate more plans for the summer and too early to adopt autumnal hyperactivity. Every second person is on vacation and organizational wheels roll at a more leisurely pace.


By August, the garden is pretty much a given. Most everything that’s going to die has done so and, as long as you remember to water, the rest grows so rampantly that it would be hard to stop it, even if you tried. 


But why would you? August yields a feast for the body and fine food for the eye: vermilion tomatoes, emerald peppers, amethyst eggplants. What other month is so unabashedly voluptuous?


August’s most sterling quality, however, is the absence of holidays within its bounds. There is in August not a single officially ordained celebration of any magnitude. There are no obligatory rituals to endure, no traditions to defend. August requires no greeting cards, no tinsel or flags, no boxes of candy, plastic pumpkins or green beer. And not once in all of August are we forced by governmental decree to survive our Monday on a Tuesday.


August is as it is with good design. Without the relatively uncluttered weeks of early August, we could not face the frenzied rigors to come. As the days shorten, we redeem these unstructured hours, fuel to power us up and over the summit of Labor Day and on to all that lies ahead.