Speaking of love, my dad died two years ago today.  He was 91. Cloth cap dilettante born into corridors of class and circumstance, working life—draftee, decorator, copper , courier—half-disguised secret dream self—poet, memoirist, local historian, cricket lover, hillwalker, herpetologist, hankerer after high, wild places. . . . He'd fallen at home a couple of weeks before but, in the way these things often seem to go, he’d rallied and was doing better. The end, when it came, was quick. He was holding my mother's hand and died on his own bed, in his own house, on his own terms. Change was a horror. “Time is the enemy” he once wrote. “It plucks you back when you would run; it hurries you when you would pause to reflect.” I remember the family joke about Time's great black oxen, their galloping hooves trampling all before them. We laughed then, but we knew all along that those oxen are real. And now he's two years gone.  On my last trip back, in 2019, we talked about Edwar

Sunspots August, 1988: The intersection of Wooster and Prospect Streets, Crystal City, Ohio. Hot and humid. A lanky white boy in a black leather jacket and Beatle boots is feeling the heat as he walks downtown. He's taking in the sights and the whole crazy adventure of America, a place imagined through the fictions of Jack Kerouac, Jim Rockford, Theo Kojak, wide eyed with possibilities only imagined back there in the narrow grey valleys of Yorkshire. Now here he is in Crystal City, USA, and the sky is wide and bright--there are stop signs!--and despite his studied nonchalance he feels a lot conspicuous, a lot out of place.  He sweats his way across the incandescent intersection in his heavy black jacket and pointy boots. Suddenly there's a forest green 1968 Ford Fairlane, heading South on Prospect, and a ruddy face, topped by a disheveled mop of blond hair, framed in the glassless square of the open car window.  "Are you a drummer?" the face asks.  "No, I'm n

  "Today , we've got an easter egg hunt for orphans and then visits to the State mental institute - We're kept real busy!  30 hr. drive home - blah!     Love, Jane"