Blog Entries from GrahamLewis

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  1. Reflections on My Golden River

    Time, time, time

    On our neighborhood walks my wife and I used to walk past a big old deciduous tree (as I recall, though it may have been a pine). A couple years back, though, it dropped its biggest branch and some others in a storm, and the property owners had it removed. All of it, stump and all. This year when we walked past that spot, there is absolutely no indication that the tree was ever there. Once the next generation of property owners move in, no one will recall that tree. It existed, but now...
    By GrahamLewis · Apr 20, 2024 at 1:49 AM · 77 · 1
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  2. Reflections on My Golden River

    The Wagon

    When I was around 12 years old we lived at the far edge of a large city, where the houses on land lately-wrested from farms being pushed aside by housing developments. Across the street from our house was a cornfield still being farmed, and beyond those some rolling hills used for grazing cattle. Those cattle were owned by a nearby convent, where the nuns had made a living by leasing the land out. I'm not Catholic and never knew much about the place, but it had been there for years and...
    By GrahamLewis · Feb 24, 2024 · 221 · 2
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  3. Reflections on My Golden River

    Hard to Explain

    Describing a dream, no matter how moving to the teller, invariably brings feigned interest and stifled yawns from the most patiently listening audience. The magic of the dream, its spell, cannot be captured in the outside world; it comes from deep within the dreamer. Vivid imagery and intense emotion can't be easily, if at all, captured by words and the logic of telling. It's the same with my recent sojourn back to western Nebraska. Most people have no idea of what that landscape is...
    By GrahamLewis · Jun 24, 2023 · 321
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  4. Reflections on My Golden River

    Cue the Eerie Music

    While reading cultural anthropologist Loren Eisely's autobiography, All the Strange Hours, a book that had mysteriously appeared on my bookshelf years after I thought I had given it away or lost it I came upon this entry: "In the year 1975 twenty-one people died in a air crash at the Mayan religious center of Tikal in Guatemala. Strange, is it not, that twenty-one tourists born over a thousand years after the fall of the Mayan Empire, and only aware of it because of the archaeological...
    By GrahamLewis · Jun 13, 2023 · 383
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  5. Reflections on My Golden River

    Honestly, It's Not for Everyone

    That’s Nebraska’s current tourism slogan, and it seems perfect to me. Most people from the state (at least among those I know) will freely admit there are no obviously sublime sights, no real mountains, no towering redwoods, no massive canyons, only one real waterfall (and it ain’t much by Niagara standards). But then they will say something like, “it’s got a lot of subtle beauty.” And so it does. I was born in ranch country, way out in the northwest corner of the state, in the shadow...
    By GrahamLewis · Mar 14, 2023 · 539
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  6. Reflections on My Golden River

    True to Type

    I've been reading H.L. Mencken's A Choice of Days, selections from his autobiography that deal with his early adult life, culminating with his work as reporter and later city editor of the Baltimore Sun. Engaging, clever, sometimes painfully casually racist, but all in all a good read. But what I am most taken by at the moment is the cover photo of him as a young man, at a desk, corncob pipe in one hand, a stack of typed paper to one side of an old-fashioned typewriter, with his other hand...
    By GrahamLewis · Feb 23, 2023 · 396
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  7. Reflections on My Golden River

    Why I Bother

    Some days it's hard to get motivated to write, suspecting that it doesn't matter what I write or how well (or poorly) I do it. There was a time when I had visions of publication, or at least the idea that I could accomplish something of somehow lasting significance. But even back then I suspected I was chasing an illusion. One of my favorite poets has long been Stephen Spender, and one of my favorite of his poems is "What I Expected." He writes that What I expected, was Thunder,...
    By GrahamLewis · Oct 28, 2022 · 633 · 3
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  8. Reflections on My Golden River

    It's All Good

    My kid sister died about a month ago. I'm still processing it. I tried to capture it below, but I'm so close to it that I can't tell if it's worth reading, or it's TMI. I didn't want to post it in the workshop, because it's not meant as a project but as an effort to understand. I recently touched death, touched it when I held the icy-cold, blackened, hand of my dying kid sister and learned from her the art of dying right. Susan (not her real name) was diagnosed with cancer about four...
    By GrahamLewis · Oct 18, 2022 · 702 · 1
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  9. Reflections on My Golden River

    Weathering it All

    Last Sunday the temp in Omaha Nebraska reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit. And the weather nannies were telling people to stay indoors and all that. So why was I, at age 72, outside, in or near my tent much of the day? Even though I had pitched it in the shade of a large maple, the humidity and air temperature combined encouraged a lot of sweating. I was there because I had scheduled the trip a couple weeks earlier. My mother at 97 is still lucid and on stubbornly on her own, but barely...
    By GrahamLewis · Jul 25, 2022 · 561 · 1
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  10. Reflections on My Golden River

    The Things we Keep

    My neighbor directly across the street died a few weeks back, at the age of 92. His wife died about five years earlier. They lived in the same house for about 50 years,and raised five kids in it. He died at home, the fact that he was able to stay out of nursing home was due to the willingness of his sons to come and stay with him until the very end (his one daughter did too, as she could, but she lives in California). Anyway, once he died and things settled down, the kids decided to sell...
    By GrahamLewis · Jul 9, 2022 · 612 · 2
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  11. Reflections on My Golden River

    IF I EVER GET OUT OF HERE

    COVID hits our little family big-time
    By GrahamLewis · Jun 17, 2022 · 637 · 3
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  12. Reflections on My Golden River

    Piscis Fugit

    Maybe 10 years ago my daughter won a goldfish in some sort of raffle or such. Cost her one quarter. 25 cents. She named the fish "Adele" and we put her into a small fishbowl. She outlived my admittedly pessimistic expectations, and soon outgrew the bowl. We got her a bigger one. Ultimately, we bought a nice 20-gallon tank, with filter and a gravel bottom. Which is where she's been for the past several years, in a corner of the "family room," where we enter and leave from the garage,...
    By GrahamLewis · May 27, 2022 · 553
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  13. Reflections on My Golden River

    Man is like the grass that flourishes and is gone.

    I'm not much of a Biblical person, not because of animosity toward the Bible or the faith, but because of unfamiliarity. As a kid I only rarely attended Sunday school, and when I did I invariably got lost in any reference to a particular book of the Bible. Later I learned to understand and appreciate Christianity, but never really the Bible per se, especially the Old Testament. Anyway, the above words popped into my mind the other day, as I was rooting through long-sealed cardboard boxes...
    By GrahamLewis · May 15, 2022 · 1.1K · 4
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  14. Reflections on My Golden River

    River Rocks

    I have a secret addiction. I cannot pass by a jumble of river rocks -- those small stones gathered together and sold for landscaping purposes -- without glancing down at them and, at the risk of seeming odd to any passerby, picking up one or two that momentarily pique my interest. And I've found some intriguing ones: a small agate (not of commercial value), some fossiliferous limestone (seashells and the like that have accumulated and become incorporated into stone), a piece of...
    By GrahamLewis · May 11, 2022 · 748 · 3
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  15. Reflections on My Golden River

    Homeless Lite

    Back in the ol' hometown and I decided that rather than staying in and paying for a hotel -- and rather than accepting invites to crash at friend's houses or sleeping on mom's couch -- I'd take my tent and sleeping bag and camp in a city park. It's a nice tent and a nice park, though my little tent is dwarfed by rows of RVs. But the night was quiet and calm, no rain and no noise. But it's hard to make the compromise between hotel and home. The tent's too small to do anything other than...
    By GrahamLewis · May 7, 2022 · 740 · 1
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