Almost two years ago, in the middle of my first winter back on the east coast, I decided that, come March, I was going on a trip. As somebody who likes to travel, there wasn't anything terribly novel about this decision. But I suppose you could say that, given that I was planning on going…
(Greek) light acquires a transcendent quality: it is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy. Here the light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated. - Henry Miller (The Colossus of Maroussi), qtd. in Tony Perottet's…
We have all been brought up on stories from the "Panhandle," the northern part of Texas that is truly the shape and just as flat as the handle of an old pot iron skillet. Perhaps the most famous tale is the myth that in winter there is nothing between Amarillo and the North Pole but…
I find that time moves differently when you travel, or at least that's how it feels when at each and every turn your senses are being assailed by new sights, smells and flavors. It's both exhilarating and exhausting, an experience that you want to savor, but, by the time you've moved onto the next wonder,…
And for a moment I lose myselfWrapped up in the pleasures of the worldI've journeyed here and there and back again... -Smashing Pumpkins ("Thirty-three") For exactly one week and two days, I have been 33 years old. Despite being a palindrome, I'm not quite sure there's anything all that special about this age, although a…
The stuffing was pleasantly salty, flecked with celery and onion and rich with the flavor of broth. It was, in short, exactly as I remembered it. I told my grandmother just that, letting her know that I had missed these flavors during our Thanksgivings apart. Never mind that I could have made her stuffing myself;…
The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. -Norman MailerAlmost three months after the…
--tomorrow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us (if they do, we'll move away still further: into now -E.E. Cummings ("84") Moving, there's no doubt, is an ugly business. Ever so slowly, the life that you carefully built is dismantled: book by book, dish by dish, sock by hole-in-the-toe sock. There's a…
Whenever anybody asks me where I'm from, I usually say Pittsburgh. This, however, is quite far from the truth; I'm actually from a small town, a village really, that is called Fredericktown (if you take a look at the pathetic Wikipedia entry for my hometown, you'll see why I opt for answering any questions about…
Writing this post, my last about my trip to Greece, I'm sitting in an air-conditioned apartment in New York City; while the past few days have been wonderful, my legs are more than a tad sore and I'm two shades short of exhausted. There's a part of me that longs for home (oh, to cook…
Dining with Dostoevsky 