Around 1980, when I was a young man living in New York, I belonged to a writer’s group. It was a lovely group. We would meet every week or every two weeks on a rotating basis, going from apartment to apartment. At the start, I think there were six of…

I read the news yesterday about Stephen Sondheim’s death. Like many others, I was saddened and shocked, even though he was 91. But the first thing I thought of was not his music, not his Broadway shows. It was his relationship with Oscar Hammerstein. Hammerstein was a lyricist who co-wrote…

It’s Phil Deaver’s birthday today, as facebook reminds me. Phil died on April 29, 2018. I suppose they’ll be reminding people about my birthday long after I’m gone, too. But I’m glad they did. It came at just the right time. I think of this wonderful guy, so wholeheartedly in…

I find these words inadequate in writing about Jerilyn Caesar. This is really just a way for me to post some photographs of her so you can remember her, remember how beautiful she was. Other people knew her differently than I did, and I hope they write about her to…

We have a reputation. The term “bird watcher” seems to imply someone overdressed in khaki fatigues, wearing a floppy hat, with an enormous pair of binoculars drooping around his or her neck, a notepad in hand, in which she or he, in ecstasy, scribbles down the latest sighting of the…

Sometime in the early 1980s, when I was living in New York City, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In those days, I went often. It was a sunny fall day. I climbed the familiar marble steps and walked into the main entrance hall. It’s a vast space…

Sometimes we become fascinated, even obsessed, by a historical figure. But we’re not sure why. This is my case with Sebastián de Morra. He was a dwarf, known, if he is known at all, for having been painted by Diego Velázquez nearly four centuries ago. The portrait, now in the…

“Mothers are all slightly insane,” Holden Caulfield says at one point in The Catcher in the Rye. I always knew what he meant. It was never a quote that I puzzled over. In five words, he nailed it. Yes, mothers are all slightly insane, some more slightly than others. They’re…

Thirty years ago, my book, French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, was published. It’s strange to write that sentence. I suppose I never imagined I would. Since its debut in 1991, the book has never been out of print. For that, I’m eternally grateful…