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My minister asked us this morning to think about how we experienced nature early in our lives. Here goes. I grew up in suburban New Jersey and, as a kid, my wild place was behind our house. We lived in the first house into our neighborhood, a busy road on one side of our home,…
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We’ve had a mouse problem. It started with a text from Virginia on my Monday morning walk that said “Mouse! Come home!” I came home, seemingly trapped it in a bathroom and went to get some mouse traps. By the time I returned, it was gone. But we set our traps and the next morning,…
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I was going through a photo album from 1968 made up of photos mostly taken by my father-in-law, and it was as if I was meeting him for the first time. Which, in some ways, I was. Charles Christopher Kirk died in 1974, when I was 9, Virginia was 12, and we were almost 15…
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I’ve never been much of a flower person. I’ve let Virginia do the work of encouraging things to grow and be beautiful, and I water, yank up weeds and prune when things get unruly. But last year, I decided to try my hand at it. I dug out a garden in our backyard and planted…
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A Piece of American Trivia As I browsed in a Hallmark store one day in the mid-nineteen-eighties, I found a card listing famous people who have the same birthday as me. I was startled when I saw my own name. My father had told me years before about the youngest governor in the nation who…
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My friend David Jack is one of the most inspiring people I know. He is a fitness professional whose work is deeply tied to his commitment to seeing people thrive spiritually and physically. He is huge—6–4 and lots of muscle—yet completely approachable. Kids love him. Adults love him. Katie Couric LOVES him. Most of all, Dave is curious—about…
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Lately there have been a few things coming together and making me wonder about the long shadow of 9/11. I just finished re-listening to Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which is an exhaustive take on Osama bin Laden, from his birth through his misadventures to his almost inexplicable eventual success and post-9/11 scurrying to Tora…
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This is a poem I wrote in 2014 as I felt I was coming around a bend and could see some re-assessments coming. Eight years later, it’s kinda true and kinda not. (Image credit: Photo by Mohammad Rezaie on Unsplash) I want to be a little old man. Concentrated, reduced, Like a sauce my…
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Allen Iverson did not have a positive relationship with practice, as he made clear in a famous end-of-season rant. But, did I agree with him?
