"Texas Forever"

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…

The Land of Enchantment

"This really isn't like anything you ever saw — and no one who tells you about it gives any idea of it." -Georgia O'Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz It was dark when we finally arrived in Santa Fe. More importantly, it was late, almost midnight, which made the city (with a population of 70,000, this is…

Utterly Grand

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,…

Viva Las Vegas

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…

Here, There, Everywhere

"Don't discourage me. In my job I have to paste one fact to another with words, and in the end everything has to seem coherent even if it's not.""But if the coherence isn't there, why pretend? "To create order." -Elena Ferrante (The Story of the Lost Child)      It's hard to believe now as life again…