The day after Valentine’s Day one bouquet of roses rises tall on my kitchen counter (the long-stems). The shorter-stems reside on a refrigerator shelf, extending their life (shelf life?) and making me glad everytime I open the refrigerator door.
In honor of the combination of Black History Month and Valentine’s Day week, I’m running a “Black Valentine” series to profile several of the most vibrant Black couples I’ve met in St. Louis. We begin with Howard and Vickie Denson, the force behind the St. Louis Black Pages. Howard is an art collecting maven of…
That “30th anniversary” picture represents the usual welcome I like to surprise visitors with when they come to town to celebrate a honeymoon or romantic anniversary; the petals are real, and, whenever I can find out secretly in advance what the actual wedding flowers were, I try my best to get that flower and color…
Mother shooed us into the cellar. I turned my pockets inside out and showed her my discoveries. While we waited for the storm to pass, my mother told us stories: saints’ bones preserved in crypts of faraway cathedrals; healers who told the future by throwing bones as if they were dice; and air-raid cellars in…
Sogyal Rinpoche, author of “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” and the head of Rigpa, an international Buddhist group urges us on to follow a compassionate logic.–JGR _____________________________________________ We may say, and even half-believe, that compassion is marvelous, but in practice our actions are deeply uncompassionate and bring us and others mostly frustration and…
Pelicans link my lives in two locations this morning. Daniel and I see pelicans when we kayak on Clear Lake in Northern California. We paddle round the small peninsula, and there, they are! A cloud of squawking white swirling and settling on the water. I see a blur of pelicans this morning, looking over my…
In honor of the combination of Black History Month and Valentine’s Day week, I’m running a “Black Valentine” series to profile several of the most vibrant Black couples I’ve met in St. Louis. I met Carlos and Sylvia Jenkins at the Missouri History Museum evening featuring Ron Himes. Carlos and Sylvia run CJS Vision 500,…