Month: November 2025

Of a Man, His Dog, and a Stick

The immeasurable joy that a pup feels upon spying the perfect stick—though is not every stick perfect?—to seize it between the teeth, to trot about in triumphant exaltation, to preen and prance, to clench and cherish it as though gold, or life itself, were held within the jaws, precious beyond all things. If only I could delight in anything with such unfeigned enthusiasm—as that stick, its discovery, its seizure, its hold.

Ah, to find such rapture in the ordinary! To greet the world not with suspicion but with wonder, to see in the roughness of bark and the scent of earth a treasure beyond price. She asks no meaning of the stick, no purpose beyond the play; she does not weigh its straightness nor lament its splinters. She exults simply because it is there—because it can be grasped, borne, and shared with the wind.

And when I feign to take her most prized possession from her, she does not crouch defensively nor guard it with wounded pride. She startles not in fear, nor suspects deceit, but spies instead an opportunity for play—for spirited contest, for joyous fun. A game of keep-away, of chase, of tug-of-war, of tag. The stick becomes not a treasure to hoard, but a bond to share, a spark of communion between kindred souls who, for a moment, forget the hierarchy of species and simply are. How effortless her wisdom seems: to turn every threat into invitation, every grasp into dance. What the world calls possession, she calls participation; what we call loss, she calls laughter.

Laugh I must too, for in her play I am carried back to youth—when a stick could be anything the heart desired: a sword flashing against unseen foes, a spear cast toward the sky, a knight’s lance, a shepherd’s staff, a trumpet summoning invisible armies, a conductor’s baton commanding the symphony. How endless were the shapes of imagination then! She reminds me of what I once possessed without knowing its worth—the gift of invention, the sacred power of play.

And so I laugh, though a tear is not far behind, for the years slip away like autumn leaves on the wind, and I remember what it was to live so lightly. She, in her wisdom, has become my teacher—her joy a gentle rebuke to my solemnity, her play a sermon on the holiness of delight. If ever there is grace to be found, it is in such simple acts: a stick, a chase, a glint of sunlight on the grass, a heart unburdened by purpose. Perhaps salvation lies not in grand design, but in this—to love a stick as though it were the world, and to find, in that loving, the world made whole again.

A Skipping Stone

A skipping stone, chosen with care by human hand,
breaks the still glass of lake serene;
for stones remember what time forgets,
and in their flight, recall all the more.

What does it remember?
The molten cradle of its birth beneath the sea,
the mountain’s shattering rise from the deep,
the patient sleep in riverbed and shore.
The warmth of the palm that cast it forth,
the whisper of air between each skip—
and how, in falling, it becomes again
what it has always been:
stillness beneath all motion.

On the Em Dash

The em dash—now ever present in my writing—was, for the better part of my life, a non-entity. For several obvious reasons.

First, though it may have appeared in my handwritten script, I scarcely distinguished it from an ordinary dash or hyphen; the length of line between words was inconsequential in my already indecipherable and increasingly illegible hand. In truth, I long remained unaware of its proper name, or of the distinctions of nomenclature that punctuation ascribes to the several lengths of line between words.

Second, my earliest years of composition were spent at the typewriter. There, whether composing at the typewriter or transcribing handwritten script at the typewriter for submission and review, I knew only the dash—or the double dash—a generally unattractive contrivance, with space-dash-space between words when some pause seemed warranted. Better, I thought, a semicolon, a colon, or perhaps parenthetical for the offset thought.

And then came my first decades at the computer, where a stilted admixture of bureaucratic and legalistic form constrained me: such mandated style allowed no room for such expressive gestures. The dash—any dash—was a rarity in the acceptable prose of the office.

But in retirement, in the rediscovery of prose and poetry and possibility, I learned how easily the ungainly dash could be replaced by its elegant cousin—the em dash. And so I was converted: from endless parentheticals, unsightly space-dash-space, and other intrusive devices, to this versatile and dashing stroke. Poets and novelists know its power—and so, it seems, to the consternation of creative writers everywhere, does artificial intelligence.