The bookshop generally closed later on Friday evenings, at 7:00 rather than 6:00 PM. In the summer it was still full daylight, but in winter it was completely dark outside by then. I don’t know why I stayed open so late. Perhaps I did so because some
On either side of the bottom of the steps leading up to the Duomo of Treviso in the Veneto Province of northeastern Italy, lie two salmon-pink lions. They are made of fish and shit. No one knows who sculpted these beasts. They date from the Romanesque period, likely created sometime
I don’t remember her name, but I do remember her. Let’s call her ‘Susan’. A second-hand bookshop tends to attract unusual characters. Sometimes I felt like a bartender without alcohol involved. People seem to have the notion that a bookshop (particularly the small second-hand type) is a place
Let's have some fun with Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Facebook Ah, to post or not to post, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Facebook comments Or to write a reply against a sea of troubles And
In the early 1980s I lived in a small town in southern New Mexico called Alamogordo. I had a job that required my going to Chino, California, at least once or twice a month, which entailed having to drive two hours through the desert to get a plane in El
It was a cool October morning as I walked along the northern shore of Lake Ontario picking up a few rocks that caught my eye. They were not particularly beautiful or exceptional in any obvious way, yet I brought them home. I contacted some rock and mineral enthusiasts that I