Act 1
Me, speaking into the Perplexity AI browser’s microphone: “How long is the French Camino?”
What Perplexity heard: “Hello, this is a test.”
What Perplexity replied: “Hello! Test received loud and clear. What’s on your mind?”
Act 2
Me, a little perplexed with Perplexity: How long is the French Camino?”
Continue reading
Showing up late for a party stoned and tipsy wasn’t very original in late-1969, though I was getting damned good at it — and tired of it all — a rudderless college drop-out, dodging the draft, hiding out in Washington D.C. in the shadow of the Selective Service.
I was fast becoming a mess.
Nobody at John and Linda’s party noticed – even when I stumbled back against the bookshelf and slid to the floor while Jenny from West Virginia badgered me with her latest career dilemma: Airline stewardess? Or a psychologist?
Continue reading
My cousin Maura Manley passed away on Friday. She was seven years younger than me, but the first of our adult cousins to go.
About the same time, this post popped up on Facebook. And a picture of my mother in a hospital bed in Florida. She and I spent her last Thanksgiving together, although I had to eat alone in the cafeteria and she had the institutional fare in her room. Still, we spent the day together. One of our last.
I got to spend time with Maura this summer, when she was happy, healthy, and reveling in all the family gathered for a reunion in Pennsylvania. There were a lot of us.
I’m posting this here because, well, because it keeps family from disappearing, as a time when family is starting to do just that.
In the picture above: Yes, I’m the one who looks like a butterball turkey on my grandfather’s lap. Eight months old. My older brother, Jim, is to the right. He was an old hand at this Thanksgiving thing, a veteran. You can tell by how jaded he looks.
Our folks, Bob and Pat, are at left. At right, my dad’s siblings Don and Mary Lou. Clearly hadn’t met their forever partners yet, but soon. All three of the kids were married for life. They did that in those days. Don and Janet had five sons. Mary Lou and Bill had six daughters and two sons. Jim and I ended up with six more brothers and a sister.
Continue reading
PENNSYLVANIA — A gaggle of geese threads its way slowly up the Clarion River, paddling against a lazy and shallow, but persistent, mid-summer current. There are 10 geese, all mature. Long, elegant black necks, white wings. No fuzzy goslings.
They zig and zag, snatching bugs from the air and small fish from the river. Between the feasting and the faffing and the current, their progress is slow.
One by one, they follow the leader into the leeward side of a small rock outcropping. In the calm, they gather strength for the arduous upstream paddle ahead. Deeper, faster water awaits the geese.
Continue reading
I’m done with “push” content from newspapers, substacks, pods and podcasters, bloggers, social media platforms, conspiracy boosters, angry MAGAs, fundraisers, revolutionists, ah-has and ma-ha’s, political shamans, alarmists, talking heads, Chicken Littles, grim reapers, Beltway pundits, scribblers, cartoonists, and diatribe specialists.
Or as another noted crank once put it, I’ve had it up to here with “Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism, This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m.”
All I am saying is don’t give push a chance.
Continue reading
It was such a relief last week to learn that my old friend Bob Gannon crashed his 56-year-old Cessna 182 just outside of Las Vegas.
Of course, he walked away from the crash. The plane wasn’t called Lucky Lady Too for nothing.
Let me interject that I am simply relieved to know that Bob is still alive. And flying. I confess that I periodically check the news for recent Bob Gannon and Lady Too exploits — or an obituary. I haven’t found either in years.
Both to my distress and relief.
Continue reading
Sorry for the Dad Joke. It just came to me in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Turns out, the Cosmos is as corny as I am.
“Hey, shiny new Artificial Intelligence program: Write me a poem about walking through the Scottish Highlands and do it in the style of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”
OK, I didn’t do this. I may still do this — but I didn’t.
Not yet.
Recently, I re-read Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” for the first time since my childhood.
Continue reading
A long hike is never really over.
We finished walking Scotland’s West Highland Way on September 18. It is still very much on my mind and I suspect it will be hanging around.
There were lessons learned. Both about myself and the trail.
That’s really what it is mostly about in the end, isn’t it? Nobody walks – let’s call it 100 miles – and walks away not knowing something new about themselves.
Even if it is only whether or not you love toe socks.
Continue reading
If Van Morrison had taken the walk with me today from Inverernan to Crainlarich, he’d surely want to write a song about it. He’s not a Scot, sure, but I think he’d get it in his Celtic heart. Titles like “A Sense of Wonder,” “Into the Mystic,” “In the Garden,” and even “Cyprus Avenue” were in rotation in my head as I walked beside the River Falloch.
This was a gentle one — thank God, after yesterday — no rock piles to climb, few inclines to surmount, no risk to life and limb.
Continue reading
I would like to report that the chubby red squirrel navigated its way up the pine tree to the fifth level of branches with no assistance from me whatsoever.
You may be amazed to learn — as I was to see — that Red carried a small pinecone in its jaws while performing this feat.
Look, I know squirrels do this sort of thing very well without me. But it just seemed so important to me at the moment.
Continue reading
Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 