Fanagrams

How odd that the image of Charlie Grinstead should come to mind in such perfect detail after a 40 year hiatus.  I don’t think that I ever spoke a word to him during the two years our lives overlapped at college, and I haven’t kept up with any college friends, so there is no obvious reason, but here he is.  I can see his wad of curly hair, respectfully unkempt, unlike the shaggy hair of other classmates who aspired to a hippie look.  Long hair on both men and women was certainly the look of the era, and women would spend many hours carefully tending and trimming split ends and brushing it to a glossy sheen.  But the men were only on a quest for quantity and not quality.  Some men even used bare rubber bands – women knew better – these would catch and break hair off, but the men never cared.  While Charlie’s hair might have been a bit wild, I don’t think that it ever went over his ears, and it always had a straight part. Continue reading →

One of the books on the reading list for my upcoming writer’s workshop is “The Art of the Personal Essay,” a 700+ page anthology of essays ranging from Seneca (AD3-65) to present day.  I decided to pick my selection by riffling through the book and asking Nick to say stop.  The first random essay was by GK Chesterton, and the second by Virginia Woolf.  I was pleased to make the acquaintance of Chesterton, who is quoted by Evelyn Waugh in the novel “Brideshead Revisited,” describing the unshakeable pull of religion even among lapsed believers:

“I caught him (the thief) with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

This quote has made my list of favorite lines from a book, but I knew nothing further about Chesterton.  I was of course familiar with the name Virginia Woolf, and knew enough to spell her last name with two O’s, but knew nothing of her writing. Continue reading →

It was easy enough to dismiss the first signs.  After all, who hasn’t lost their car in a parking lot, particularly a nondescript white compact car that looks like so many others?  Others I ascribed to the occasional senior moment, in fact I met my mother in the lobby of the church on a Tuesday night, and it turned out that we both had the wrong day for choir practice.   And getting lost on the way to my brother’s house – understandable since this was a car trip she only took twice a year.  Easy to be in denial at this point.  Then  one day, out of the blue, a tennis playing friend of my mother’s asked me, “Do you think that your mother has Alzheimer’s disease?”  I guess my mother had gotten the score wrong one too many times.  From that point on, I started watching her like a hawk, unrealistically trying to disprove the obvious.  Not only would she lose her car, but she get in a similar car and desperately try to use her key.  Lost purses, lost names, lost words.  Continue reading →