Yodeling is not often connected with courtship. Nor humpback whales.
The fact that I employed both in pursuit of love may, in part, explain my somewhat spotty record at wooing women.
If you grew up around San Francisco Bay and remember rotary phones, you know who Pete Seeger was. Pete, who passed away yesterday, was a fixture of the SF and Berkeley folk music scene. Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Buffy St. Marie, Peter Paul & Mary…these were the minstrels of my youth, and Pete was the revered elder, the crafter of anthems, the troubadour whose clear clarion voice would sing us out of troubled times.
His singing style–head up, chin out, a smile on his face–gave me hope, and made me happy, even when the words were sad. I sang his songs around campfires. I listened to his banjo and 12-string riffs with joy. His music was simple, uncomplicated, poetic, and was always there in the backdrop of my youth, like wind in the trees, like the gloaming song of crickets.
Still, not really the stuff of romance.
And yet… Continue Reading »
During our last trip to Bath, we stopped in at Same-Same but Different, a little bistro on Bartlett Street. It had a distinctly Parisian feel to it, but with an English twist–sidewalk tables and chairs, but wicker and steel, not wrought iron; creaky floors of dark wood, but well-lit from lamps and windows; a laid-back, unhurried tempo, but with attentive service.
It’s happened to us all. That moment when a word–a perfectly innocuous, everyday word–suddenly looks weird.
If you don’t have one, you need one. In fact, you need several.
Writers aren’t like normal people.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 