The Ghosts of Rocky Flats
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Last week I dug out an old cartoon about Rocky Flats that I posted here. That cartoon led to this short essay that I wrote last Friday for my Wild Life blog. Here it is….
Twenty-one years ago this month, when I was twenty-nine, I learned that I had testicular cancer. As it happened I had recently returned to live in Worcester, Massachusetts, my hometown, and I joked to friends that I didn’t know what was worse, cancer or Worcester.
It was in Worcester that I underwent an operation to remove the malignancy and then endured a month of radiation treatment. And it was in the middle of that treatment that I, feeling queasy the way I always did during that ugly month, got a letter in the mail that would prove to be a kind of deus ex machina in the story of my life. The letter informed me that I had gotten into grad school in Boulder, Colorado, and less than four months later I left Worcester behind and moved to the appropriately named town of Eldorado Springs, a few miles outside of Boulder. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Winter Color
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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On my winter way there’s white, there’s black, and there’s every shade of gray between. But here and there a splash of color, or a subtle nod. Continue reading →
A Few More Ballads
categories: Cocktail Hour
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While I was digging out the Rocky Flats cartoon I came upon a few more Ballads of Boulder….
Guest contributor: Monica Wood
Bad Advice Wednesday, Superbowl Edition: VINCE WILFORK, C’EST MOI
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Monica Wood is today’s special guest star. She is the author of Any Bitter Thing, Ernie’s Ark, My Only Story, Secret Language, the Pocket Muse series for writers, and the forthcoming When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine.
VINCE WILFORK, C’EST MOI
Football, like all sport, teems with metaphor, boasting a long, tedious tradition of Teaching Young Men About Life. Agony, ecstasy, teamwork, character-building, yadda-yippity-yadda. But for those of us who are a) already built, characterwise; b) old enough to have absorbed our allotted portion of agony, thank you; or c) female, football is all about the glam and glitter of the offense.
Behold the snap, the hike, the bullet pass flying straight to the steely midsection of a wide receiver! Behold the gorgeous spirals! The gazelle-like runs! The circus catches in the end zone! No wonder these guys get all the glory, all the press, all the endorsements, all the girls. The quarterback and his posse: bestsellers of the Astroturf. For them the crowd chortles, it caws, it spills its beer, it waves many misspelled signs. What’s not to love?
Game Ball! (Superbowl Teaser before tomorrow’s Bad Advice, Superbowl Edition)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Since moving down to North Carolina eight and a half years ago, we have not gotten back to Cape Cod nearly as much as I’d like. But when we go, we go in style. We have lucked into a great house-sitting gig in town of Brewster near Slough Pond. We stay in the home of Katy Sidwell, an artist, extravagant and generous, and Steve Sidwell a former defensive coordinator for the Patriots, Seahawks, and Saints. While the Sidwells are away, we walk their dog Buddy, watch their art-filled house, feed their cat/s, mow their lawn (in summer), soak in their hot tub. (When Hadley was young we sang a song that another friend and I made up about this last activity to the tune of Foreigner’s “Hot Lovin’”, “Hot tubbin’ check it and see/ got a temp of 103!”)
One other perk of staying at the Sidwells is that I get to write downstairs, in Steve’s office in the basement, a space that more than earns the phrase that I first heard six years ago in relation to it, the now over-used “man cave.” But this Man Cave is more manly than most. Who else gets to have two large desks, not to mention pictures of oneself as both middle linebacker at the University of Colorado and with the Saints linebackers? Steve looks and acts the part of the football coach: he has great charm, the capacity to eat large amounts of food, and the growling resonant voice of a talking bear. And, since I admire him so much, I have taken great pains to respect his work space, just as I hope some future house-sitter will respect mine. The one exception to this rule has been in my relationship to my favorite piece of memorabilia in Steve’s office, the game ball from the Patriots win over the Dolphins on the last game of the regular season in 1997. Continue reading →
Henry Miller’s Commandments
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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A photo of a page from a yellowed book has been going around Facebook: it’s Henry Miller’s commandments, just a note he jotted to himself while living and working in Paris, c. 1932. It’s collected in a New Directions paperback called Henry Miller on Writing. And he was a guy who had a lot to say on the subject. [here’s a great interview with him in The Paris Review] Continue reading →
Don’t Let it Bring You Down
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Digging through the old ‘toon files, I found this, circa 1978, which puts me in high school at about 17. Back when I worshiped all things Neil……(Come to think about it still do.)
The Ballad of Rocky Flats
categories: Cocktail Hour
4 comments
While I was digging out the cartoon of Newt Gingrich from my old Ballad of Boulder files, I also came across this one. Boulder, the healthiest town on the planet, is right down the street from the spot where a fairly unhealthy Nuclear Trigger plant called Rocky Flats thrived in secrecy for 40 years.
For more about Rocky Flats, scroll down……
Put Your Best Photo Forward
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Bill has already tackled the subject of author photos in a very funny post. But I want to chime in, too. As I mentioned in a recent cartoon, my author photo just celebrated it’s tenth birthday. To celebrate the occasion I’d like to suggest that it might be time for writers to start using more authentic author photos. Below on the left for instance is the photo I use on my book jackets and for talks, and more than one of my hosts at those talks have come up and given me a double take (as in “Is this the right guy?”) On the right is closer to what I really look like, a grumpy, constipated 50 year old.
I would suggest that the photo on the left demands the thought bubble: “I am up here on this windswept peak, contemplating nature and looking good doing it, and the west wind, like some majestic blowdrier, is fluffing up my hair just right.” While the writer on the right seems to be thinking “Where’s my fucking coffee?”
Ultimate Glory
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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Get ready for Ultimate Glory, the book, due out next June 2017.
As for the essay below, I’ve been thrilled by the response. At this point, over 32,000 of you have seen it, with the help of Longform and USA Today, and plenty of Ultimate players, including some who weren’t born when these events occurred, have told me that this echoes their own ultimate conversions.
ULTIMATE GLORY
A Frisbee Memoir
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how to best use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back
“To My Twenties” by Kenneth Koch
We labor over our big decision and big dreams, but sometimes it’s the small things that change our lives forever. What could be smaller than this: It is the first week of my freshman year of college and I, looking for a sport to play, am walking down to the boathouse for crew, resigning myself to four years of servitude as a galley slave, when I see a Frisbee flying across the street. The Frisbee, tossed from one long-haired boy to another, looks like freedom to me. Then I notice that there are several Frisbees flying back and forth between a band of young men, all wearing shorts, with cleats hanging over their shoulders. At the time I am quite shy but, uncharacteristically, I cross the street and ask them where they are going. To Ultimate Frisbee practice, it turns out, and I am going with them. Continue reading →
