Recent content by GrahamLewis

"In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx . . . and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into...

The answer is no.

Actually yesterday. Climbing nearly half a mile of steep stone steps to reach the "Balanced Rock" at Wisconsin's Devil's Lake.

Ambling in the woods yesterday, listening casually to the birds and the wind soughing in the trees and a young guy pushed past, with music blaring. As he went on down the path, a woman coming up the path looked up at me, we both shook our heads. "I almost said something," she said quietly...

Wait a few years. You'll be thrilled.

What song was it? Not that I will probably recognize it -- nearly all my rock and pop musical knowledge stopped around 1980, except, I guess, the Traveling Wilburys.

Woke this morning to a robin trilling outside my window. Beautiful sound, even if it was still dark and not yet 5 a.m. I'll forgive that part.

While wandering into Target today, I noticed all the Father's Day ads and displays, and I realized it's been 29 years since I had to think about buying a Father's Day gift and card for my dad. Makes me suddenly miss him a lot.

I did that once with a book I had loved as a kid in our school library. I recalled only the story line and that it involved red and gray squirrels, but eventually I came up with it and found it via interlibrary loan. I think the librarian helped me sort it out. But a "beat-up paperback" might...

I'm thinking of things that we tend to take for granted, or explain away, but are still wonderful upon further consideration. Like compost -- there's something mystical about taking vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, banana and orange peels, tossing them in a big black tub and closing the lid...

Grateful for a tall glass of cold clear clean water whenever I am thirsty. So many people in the world lack that option.

Just finished Double Indemnity by James Cain. More crime noir.

A 70-some friend of mine is about to spend a week in a northwoods cabin, without internet, and is a bit anxious about how she will spend her time. She "knows" she can read and walk and all that stuff, and that we all used to live without the internet, but is still not sure she and her husband...

There is as much freedom of the spirit in watching sparrows in the street as in meditating in some mountain solitude under the stars." Alan Watts, The Meaning of Happiness

My dad spent WWII in the Aleutian Islands. He never saw combat directly, serving as a radar operator for the airbase on Adak. In many ways I think those years in the Alaskan cold and wildness were the best ones of his life.