Zen gardens were all the rage when I installed a modified version in my backyard some years ago. They still are, I’ve noticed. Peek behind the gentrified urban home or into a back corner of the suburban lot and you’re likely to see the telltale rock triad, the twisting gravel path, the lone dwarf evergreen, and the stone water bowl of the Zen garden. Just a peek won’t give you the intended experience, though. Japanese gardens are meant to be... Read more
Recently, after I’d just watched the documentary about food deserts called A Place at the Table, I was being taxi dad, driving kids around town. I discovered that a kid I know and see relatively often is not only poor, but experiences every day what is now euphemistically called “food insecurity.” Also, not incidentally, the kid is African American. All three of my kids are musicians, the circles in which they move at school are integrated, and they have formed... Read more
I’ve had a few nasty discoveries of late. All too often, I’ve found out that things I’ve always valued are considered to have very little value in the estimation of the going market. They’re just not worth as much as I’d believed. “And why the hell not?” I’ll ask, irked, when given the dismissive news by financiers, appraisers, auctioneers, and agents—anybody whose expertise I’ve called upon for a valuation. It doesn’t sit well, disillusionment—especially when you think the rest of... Read more
These days, we’re besieged by merchants marketing in myriad ways: boulevards blighted with billboards, postboxes bulging with catalogues, televisions blaring commercials, email apps packed with spam, web pages popping ads, telephones pirated by robots. These strategically planned campaigns are often costly and complex. It seems merchants have forgotten the best business builder in the arsenal, one that costs little or nothing and requires no marketing team: the impromptu generous gesture, the simple human touch. I recently confronted this reality as... Read more
News from Alabama is that researchers obscured risks of blindness, brain damage, and death in order to convince parents of 1,300 premature infants to participate in a medical study. In my last essay I argued the seemingly esoteric point that disciplines like philosophy are essential to good science. Here is a practical example: science run amok, facilitated by well-meaning people who have been steeped in an inhumane and unscientific mode of thinking that masquerades as “how science is done.” Drastically... Read more
I’m in the attic staring at boxes. One is labeled Journals, 1979-1985. Another is Journals, 1986-1990. Another is Letters: friends and family, 1975-1982. Another… But I stop to muse: Look at these hundreds of pages of letters exchanged in only seven years. Typed or handwritten originals from recipients; carbon copies of my replies. Yes, we wrote long letters then, and treasured them enough to keep them. And the journals. Spiral bound notebooks that I kept by hand daily from 1979... Read more
Continued from yesterday. On the pleasant train ride from Florence to Venice, my wife Laurie and I began to piece together a relaxed itinerary for our final days in Italy: the Jewish Ghetto—definitely; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection—pretty sure; the Doge’s Palace—we should (but haven’t we had enough history?); the Basilica di San Marco, the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari—haven’t we seen enough churches? As it turns out, we did make it into a church (more than one) in Venice, but... Read more
In Venice, in the Santa Maria della Salute church, in the presence of Madonna della Salute (Madonna of Health), I sang Debbie Friedman’s Mi Shebeirach, Jewish prayer for healing, quietly to myself. Before entering the area of the church roped off for prayer only, I hesitated. Should a pretty good Jewish boy enter a spaced designated for Catholic worship? My wife and I were near the end of our first trip to Italy. In the months leading up to the... Read more
I didn’t get many dates in high school. At the time, I thought I was too tall or too plain or too K-Mart in my style. Now I know I was just weird. I fell in love with a surfer boy I saw—but didn’t talk to—at a party one Saturday night. By Monday, I had written a letter declaring my infatuation and handed it to one of his buddies at lunch. But we didn’t speak once: not about the letter,... Read more
“Good Letters” is pleased today to welcome Morgan Meis as a regular contributor. Read Image’s interview with Morgan here. There were hints of craziness from the very first day. Pope Francis—Jorge Mario Bergoglio—was elected to the Papacy on March 13, 2013. When he went to the balcony of Saint Peter’s, he asked the people in the crowd below to pray for him. Only after receiving those prayers did he dispense his own requisite blessings upon the crowd. Unusual. The next... Read more
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