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Lois and me at the No Kings protest, March 28, 2026 Once again I am grieving on Summer Solstice. On June 20, 1982—44 years ago—my mother died of metastatic breast cancer. Four weeks ago, Lois Thetford, one of my closest friends, died of an aggressive form of abdominal cancer. She was ill for just a …

On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Shock waves from those deadly, unprovoked gunshots shook our country, my heart, my home. The next night, I participated in my first steel pan class, offered in a local community center by the Seattle Steel Pan Project. The bright sounds and brilliant …

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash Early last week, our 20-year-old furnace stopped working. We bought a replacement and had it installed, only to find that it didn’t work either. A second replacement—a different model—was installed today. By then, we had improvised with space heaters for a week, trying to stay warm without overwhelming the …

This fall, my wife Martha and I spent a month living in an apartment in Riverdale, a neighborhood in the North Bronx, New York, a few miles north of Washington Heights, where our younger son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter live. We tried out the possibility of moving to New York City to be closer to them. …

We have more power than we know. It’s time to use it. I frequently dream about events before they happen. Sometimes I’ll have a frightening dream before a terrible event; I wrote here about a dream I had before Trump was elected the first time. And sometimes the images that come are beautiful and encouraging, …