Ocean

First of all, when Madison skies are this blue in February, you know it's a cold day. When the only booth on Library Mall is one where a...

There are, during winter, these fabulously decadent moments when you close your eyes and put your face to the sun and it feels sooooooo luxu...

In the morning, I see the snow. It isn’t beautiful – not in the downward fall. It’s rather skimpy, even as I learn that it will be a signifi...

Love. I know, it’s too early to be posting about love. That’s Sunday talk. Valentine’s Day "nonsense." Still, as I stop at a café ...

It has been such a long time since I’ve been drunk or giddy or irresponsible. Or on a bike, making my way to Ed’s farmette, or on a train, o...

We hiked the ridge (Blackhawk Ridge, west of Madison), up, then into the forest... ...where views, hidden at full foliage time, trickled in ...

Six years ago I had my neck poked and dissected in a search for some pernicious disease. I remember it because I blogged about it. No one fo...

My friend in St Paul wrote a post that reminded me of squirrels. More accurately, it reminded me that I need to slow down. Ed (always good...

I read in the NYTimes earlier this week that a person’s irrational fear of driving on highways (irrational because it turns out that highway...

My copy of Bon Appetit showed up in the mailbox today. (Lonely without its Gourmet companion.) I read the editor’s page on the elevator trip...

A routine has been established. Not a great one, not during this cold month anyway, but it’s there: after class on Mondays, I take the bus t...

It’s a good thing that my occasional traveling companion is such a sketchy reader of Ocean (like a kid reading a boring book, he concentrat...

It is inevitable that when you get together with a friend who has tracked your life for nearly 30 years, you’ll find yourself reminiscing. I...

Like a child plucked out of a life of hardship and thrown into unknown riches, Ed investigates all that the suite offers. He doesn’t need no...

Outside my office, I listen to the conversation between my colleagues and a visiting scholar from South Africa. The visitor is traumatized b...

I have not biked to work in 2010. I cannot take the cold, the sudden ice patch, the clumsiness of pedaling in many layers of wraps. But with...

A student finds a quiet corner in the hallway. Sunlight is streaming in but I doubt he notices. Computer, a coffee, music. Effective barrier...

Hum it to yourself as you read. (It’s from Dr. Zhivago, at the point where he reaches his sweetie'e place, in the dead of a Siberian win...

One good side to a busy schedule is that once you’ve stepped on the treadmill of the day, you don’t have to think about what’s next. And so ...

A wet, foggy January Saturday. Hand picked by me for a brief excursion. Just outside city limits, to a place that is silent and beautiful. S...