Piggyback rides constitute the kind of service I enjoy providing – one that brings joy to all parties. In recent decades, the concept of a service provider being primarily and genuinely concerned with the quality of service provided and customer satisfaction seems to have mutated…
Category: memoir
It’s Back!
Before I left Sweden a few weeks ago, the Swedish Health Minister, Jacob Forssmed, warned that a new and virulent mutation of the COVID-19 virus had emerged and advised citizens to take necessary precautions…
Forest Bathing
Today, I did something that for me was once unremarkable but nowadays isn’t: walking in the forest of southern Sweden. For most, it was a stay indoors kind of day—chilly, thickly overcast, windy, and intermittently drizzly…
See with Your Heart
The first time I saw Gustaf Fjaestad’s magnificent pastel, The Boy Who Sees with His Heart (1898), it was love at first sight…
Holy Family
In college, I dated a really nice fellow named Chuck…
Gardening
I am happily surprised by the joy I derive from gardening. My father would have observed dryly, ‘I told you so’…
Dresden
I’ve been coming to Dresden regularly (at least every other year) since the mid-1990s and it’s been fascinating to observe the city’s transformation following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989….
Walking to Spitzkunnersdorf
Inexplicably reluctant to break my writing procrastination streak, instead of writing my Monday blogpost, a ritual I enjoy, I decided to spend the cool, sunny morning taking a short hike….
Balancing Act
During the past year, the unexpected deaths or devastating traumas experienced by close friends and family have instigated intensified reflections on mortality, materialism, legacies, and the choices we make. I’d prefer to have such thoughts poke me a lot less often…
Hope & Happiness
I thought about my sudden change of humor and how someone else’s success transformed my somber mood of detached concentration into a vibration of joy that lingered as a gentle quivering undercurrent…