Eight and a half years ago, an elderly friend of mine died, and one of the guys I play basketball with got leukemia. It got me thinking about that thing we always seem to believe is unthinkable — Death. So I sat down and planned my funeral...
I think I’ve always enjoyed walking in cemeteries. That may seem odd, especially during our present national crisis. But walking — well-separated from each other — is one of the few activities that are still available to us as we keep our heads...
July 10, 1981 By Patrick T. Reardon On this porch, on this cool summer day, when the moon is benign in afternoon sky, when birds sing from wire to wire, I have no argument. This may be the milk-and -honey time...
Over the last year, I’ve read two books that knocked my socks off — the exquisitely evocative “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison and that massive, epic, beautiful whale of great literature, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. I came to...
In recent days, I’ve been doing a lot of walking. I know that this may soon come to a halt if the efforts to combat coronavirus in the United States lead to a mandatory quarantine, keeping me at home, away from everyone else. For now, though, I’m...
For a week or so after I finished reading The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson, the name of Roman Pulanski kept popping into my head at odd moments. I hated that. I hated Wasson’s book for drumming that name...
Family package By Patrick T. Reardon I left my phone on the back seat of a taxi, and, when I borrowed one from a cornrowed woman, gap-toothed, the voice answering was my dead Mother telling me it served me right...
It’s the awkward ones that touch me most — the images of an agitated Mary responding to the arrival of the angel Gabriel with the message that, if she consents, she will become the mother of Jesus, the Mother of God. In her 2018 book Divine...
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