Authors Electric

Me at Cape Cod, age 2 With spring, this old city boy’s life orbits back towards its perihelion with nature. Disintermediated greenery awaits just out my door again, no camping trips necessary. Time to walk the parks and explore a nearby riparian reserve, time to contemplate gnarled wild apples putting forth their pale green buds and lacy white blossoms. I sit in the sand of a Chicago beach and gaze at the vastness of water and sky where downtown’s skyscrapers – like a towering ship in the distance – meet mighty Lake Michigan dotted with sailboats, newly released from winter dry docks, yawing in the wind. I stroll to our neighborhood farmers markets, opening for the season. I’ll feast my eyes on the freshly picked fruits and vegetables that glisten in the fullness of outdoor light, unlike factory farmed produce embalmed in supermarket fluorescence. I’ll pick up a deep green, dewy bunch of rapini—“broccoli raabe” as my Rome-born mother called them—and smell its earthy Crucif...

Gavin and his book on city wildlife One of my earliest childhood memories is of scattering breadcrumbs around my grandmother's back porch on a bright, snowy, New England winter morning. It must have been a Sunday because she was rolling ravioli dough in the kitchen. The porch extended from the rear of her upper floor Victorian flat, perched on a hillside overlooking an icy Mystic River in the then mainly Irish, Italian and Portuguese, Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts. Feeding "nonna's birds" was a "big boy" treat for which I bundled up in navy blue woolen coat, cap and leggings. She felt a kinship with those birds, espcially for the sparrows, pigeons, blackbirds who braved the frigid, Northeastern winters instead of migrating south. "Just-a like-a we do," she smiled her big warm smile, "Dey no run away to Florida. So dey need-a little-a help-a sometime," she would add, " poverini " [poor little ones]. Once I h...

I turn eighty on the 16th of this month. In a global perspective, this will amount to a mere 30,000 days, roughly, or some 700,000 hours of puttering about this four-billion-year-old rock spinning in space. It covers a lot of ground for me nonetheless as I continue to strew my path with printed words. As it turns out, May also marks two years since I started blogging with my fellow esteemed Authors Electric. I'm not much for reflection, but now is as good a time as any. Like golfers, symphony conductors,  Colonel Sanders , and  the Energizer Bunny , writers seem to go, go and go until they stop. That's my intention, anyway. I detect little change as my odometer rolls into its eighth decade. I have half-dozen projects in process, none of which I can guarantee will come to fruition. Among them: a speculative fiction novella and my autobiographical novel, The Einstein Express , and a sequel to Ophelia Rising . for which I keep gathering string. This year's to-do list...