Blue Moon It happened today at 6:43 AM, an event that, on the average, occurs every 2 ½ years. I’m talking about the Blue Moon. Astronomically speaking, most of us think of a Blue Moon as the second full moon to occur within one calendar month (though the more...

  What do trade magazines and scuffed shoes have in common? It’s a personal thing. They are integral to the two resolutions I just can’t keep. Two years in a row I’ve resolved to polish my leather shoes once a month. How hard is that? I have no objection to shoe...

When I was a high school sophomore, the English teacher said to our class, “Creativity is working within the constraints.” The concept was new to my 15-year-old brain. Wasn’t a constraint something bad, something that held you back? Well, no, that was more like a...

  I’ve been on the road a lot lately. The road is in my head and the destination was suggested by my great-grandma, Mary J. Patterson. In 1893, at the age of nineteen, she boldly boarded a train in Portland, Oregon, and, without a chaperone, traveled to Chicago...

Writing, as a type of work, can have long stretches of days at the desk and/or hunched over research books, striving to finish a project that you hope someone besides yourself will someday read. Nothing seems to move except your fingers. I was moaning about this to my...

Every family has its legends. The longer these legends are around, the more embellishments they acquire. In my family, there’s a story about something my maternal grandfather did in Prohibition days that involved his mother-in-law (though she never found out about it...