Autobiographical

I love the sound of the train. Both, when it pulls into town signaling – you could even tell the differences in the way the whistle is blown. The right person probably could distinguish who is the engineer for the evening. Not even just the train whistle, but sometimes I like to be near the tracks and just hear that clanking and grinding sound and feel the throb of all that power. Man has done ...

When I was a little kid, I had a bag of marbles. We used to play marbles outside in the dirt for hours. Can you imagine kids doing this today? We almost always went outside to play, unless the weather was really bad. I remember one day my friend Bruce Robinson and I climbed up to the top of a couple of young maple trees during a ferocious wind storm. We held on to those thin trees for dear life as the merciless wind buffeted us around. We were both screaming at the top of our lungs in real fear. ...

Many years ago, my great friend John and I met a couple of young women and their companion, while traveling in Paris. The girls had obvious and natural attractions and their friend was a great guy whom I liked right off and we got together the next day and explored some more together. We wrote back and forth, this new fellow and I, for a while after I returned home to the US.



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I sit in my nook, reading the last of Robinson Crusoe (two syllables, by the way); the part where he travels by land now. He's had it with the Sea -- understandable. Anyway, I sit here, alone, with my grown-up son's abandoned but powerful computer humming away, and my big screen, my flatscreen monitor -- I chart his course of 400 years ago using Google's mapping software. I can imagine the French Pyrenees, separating the ...

All winter we shivered away up here in a one-bedroom apartment, trying to buy a house, hoping to start the spring together somewhere new. Every house we looked at had nice features -- hell, some of you have seen many of them. Every place we saw was anywhere from 60% to 85% what we wanted. But there was always something, and sometimes a bunch of things, that we would've had ...