The Man with No Shoulders There is a new patient from Side One sitting at the piano. He gracefully plays a subtle melody with one hand, smiles to himself, a slight smile, as from some inner delightful secret he shares with himself. Now the left hand starts, picking up the melody in perfect counterpoint, lightly, […]
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Written 2024Mar17 Special thanks to my dear brother Tom, who is much better known than I am in Boise, thanks to the quarter century he spent as manager of the Esther Simplot Performing Arts Academy and as principle of the Boise Philharmonic’s viola section, to name but two of his longstanding civic involvements. He helped
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Sunday, September 12, 2021San Juan Bautista, CA [Candid mid-day conversation in the front room as Frances tells of this morning’s coffee dream] Tim –What woke me up just before 7:00 o’clock this morning? Frances crying. Terribly crying, in her sleep, heart wrenching to hear. I was thinking, O my God, she’s having a nightmare about
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Learning to Ride a Bike1955 Eastridge Street, in the acute angle produced by its intersection with SW Wilshire Street, marked the southern boundary of the post-World War II apartment complex, and it was not just an arbitrary designation. The north side is where we lived and shopped. The south side presented perhaps
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Big Kite1954 It was early spring, a gusty mid-day Sunday, and Dad felt like “doing” something, as Mom would say with emphasis: elongation and raised pitch. He was in his early thirties and had a touch of cabin fever, after being inside, doing his taxes most of rainy yesterday and facilitating
Dream – Bikeride Warning It is Sunday, the 26th of January, 2020, about 8:20 AM. The aura, and a few details, of a vivid dream persist after I awoke a few minutes ago with my dear wife Frances beside me in our little house in San Juan Bautista. I need to tell
Eastridge Street Apartments, Cedar Hills, Oregon1954 – June 1956 Talking to an Airplane About 1955 Back in 1951, in the Brown House, at the “Weed Patch,” on Southwest Thurlow Drive, before Tommy was born, Dad enlisted my help in building a homemade “crystal set” radio. Even at the tender age of four,
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Music Lessons – beginning piano and cello When I was eight, shortly after moving to Leahy Road, Mom said it was time for me to start music lessons. It would be piano and she would be the teacher. I would practice nearly every day. She stressed sitting up straight on the bench, keeping a rounded
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Leahy Road stories, 1956-61 A Wonderful, Hazardous Place to Live With a big house to move around in (compared to where we lived before), a full but unfinished basement to develop projects in (even on rainy days), about half an acre of rather wild woods out back, and right next door to our school, West
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Late spring, 1956 Dad drove the four of us from the apartment, a mile or two up Barnes Road, then down Leahy Road to our new digs. He was bursting with constrained excitement to show us all around, inside and out. This acre and a quarter was the first property he ever owned, made affordable
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