When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

We’re sitting, cooped up inside Elsie’s newish apartment, part of a larger assisted-living complex she moved to after parting with the old family home and cottage over the course of the last year or so.

“Not the best time to be unloading real estate, Barnaby,” she told me throughout the process, twisting and difficult at various points, “but absolutely necessary. For my state of mind.” Continue reading

Summertime and the Living’s Uneasy

Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer/ Those days of soda and pretzels and beer…

Summer, the four seasons’ tall drink of water. The one that makes the rest of the year worthwhile.

Summertime, and the living is easy.

Long languid days by the water.

… she’s your tootsie wootsie girl/In the good old summertime.

Deliciously hot sticky nights that deliver up ardent youthful summer flings and purple prose.

Summer breeze makes me feel fine/Blowing through the jasmines of my mind…

from the summeriest of 1970s easy rockers, Seals and Crofts.

Summer. Continue reading

Dooming

4:37

a.m.

In the morning.

I am dooming.

As the kids say.

Or so I’ve heard that’s what the kids say.

I am on old man. By any standard of measure. My sources on such matters could well be unreliable. Continue reading