Supernatural? Para-natural? A muddled head? What an author saw and lived through while visiting the famous rapids in Virginia decades ago he still cannot explain.
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Humoring depression
Like a lounge lizard on mean-street rounds, depression makes itself at home with carcinogenic panache. Panache inverted to suit goblets [...]
One man’s “ferragosto”
No European capital sheds its August citizenry as decisively as Rome. The exodus is a literal rite of passage. Residents [...]
Tiger and snake
During my first decades in Rome, which began in earnest almost exactly fifty years ago, I kept a cellophane scrapbook [...]
In real life
Some weeks ago — my sense of time these days is admittedly fragile — I received an email from a [...]
Heaven in the heavens
I once fell for a girl who loved telescopes. Not astronomy or even the cosmos in some youthfully existential sense, [...]
Days of aqua pazza
What season of the witch has befallen almost-summer Rome? None that I have ever before encountered. Day after day, now [...]
Business as usual
Some forty-one years ago, Christopher Winner had the opportunity to run a sensational story about a bomb that went off in his office building, but he did not.
Once upon a footpath
Just over a decade ago, when the planet was more obsessed with terrorism than war, pestilence, or inflation, a short [...]
A “gentleman” undone
I am by nature impulsive. Some forty years ago that lifelong impulsiveness, complicit turmoil within the give-and-take of gender codes, [...]