2026: Sunday July 19: Apocalyptic

I'm kind of mad that I have to live through the apocalypse. I know, I know, the past wasn't always great and in fact was usually much less than great for most people. But twenty-first century politics, economic inequality, the info-tech hellscape, and the damn climate - it's hard to stare all the awfulness in the face at once. This week it was inescapable. 

That's wildfire smoke drifting down on the jet stream from burning northwestern Ontario. This never used to happen, but it has been three or four years in a row now when summer in Binghamton just goes smoky. 

At an Air Quality Index of 163 it is both very unpleasant and very unhealthy to be outside. Everything gets eerie and weird, like we're in a days-long partial eclipse. It smells acrid, like the neighbors are burning tires. We shut all the windows and hung out in the one room in the house with an air conditioner. I canceled my morning run. And my morning walk. And we weren't even in the worst of it. God knows how anyone in, say, Michigan, functioned. Most of it has dispersed now, as the weather pattern moved, but we're still not great and even today there were people walking in the park with masks. 

Ella and I sent photos back and forth. 

One of the best views of our valley is from the Target parking lot. It is a great place to see sunsets and watch storms roll in, so I stopped there on my way home from writing group. This was actually after the worst of it. Maybe I should have taken my time to set up this shot without the giant AT&T sign, but also maybe that is part of the story? 

This is either Brooklyn looking towards Manhattan or the other way around. The reason I can't tell is because you should be able to see the New York City skyline in the background. Instead there is just haze and the teeniest tiniest orange sun hanging there. Ok now I think about it, Ella took this in the afternoon which means the sun is in the west, so you definitely should be able to see the skyscrapers of Manhattan. But you can't. 

Now excuse me, I have to run out and buy some coca-cola so I can make a fernet con coca to drink during the Spain-Argentina World Cup final this afternoon. It's not that I am a fan of Argentina over Spain, or even that I like coke, but what am I supposed to drink? Sangria? Horchata? Gazpacho? But I do have a bottle of Fernet-Branca in the house and I've developed a taste for it. Here is one of our favorite cocktails to use it: 

I keep notes. 

2026: Saturday July 11: World Cup Soccer

Every four years I become someone who gives a damn about soccer. Non-sporty me can get quite invested in any event given the right circumstances. Baseball, tennis, olympic speed walking, I'll get totally sucked into the drama, I'll wonder at the skill, I'll care about the emotions of fans from countries I can barely place on a map. So this summer, I find myself on my feet in front of the television yelling as rich but incredibly fit and agile men with funny hairdos kick around a ball for ninety plus minutes, making some of the shadiest characters in international sports administration wealthy beyond belief.

I am very susceptible to the narrative of the underdog. Cape Verde! I'm fascinated by the internationalness of it all, the fact that the players know each other because they play together on teams in countries with no connection to their places of birth, a jumble of colors and languages and leagues. I'm intrigued that, in the words of one announcer, those countries then "dig into their diasporas" and recruit back players who were trained, raised, even born, far from their cultural origins. I love that racist Australians have to root for someone born in a Guinean refugee camp. I get sentimental watching men showing real emotion and affection, hugging and kissing each other at the end of the game, and I pretend I don't know that many of them are probably mysogynistic jerks the rest of the time. 

I will, however, refuse to go to any public watch party. The closest I ever got was the 2014 final (Germany!) that I caught in a bar at the Air New Zealand gate at LAX. But being around chants of U.S.A! U.S.A!? At the best of times that kind of jingoism makes me uncomfortable, in today's fascist age it becomes downright creepy. I'm even embarrassed for all those Norwegian fans fake-rowing in unison. I don't do that sort of thing. (I once refused to sing Pokarekare Ana in a Japanese hibachi restaurant in Port Moresby after a table of drunk Australian BP employees gave a solemn rendition of Waltzing Matilda. But then, you know I don't sing in public.)

Ok, that went off topic, but it prompted me to go look for this. I knew it was somewhere, took me half an hour to find just now because it was in the wrong place. This is maybe the day before or the day after the non-singing dinner in Papua New Guinea. 

1986: My friend Marnie and her mother buying fruit at the market. The two women watching them weren't the sellers, they were simply fascinated by white ladies shopping. 

 

2026: Saturday July 4: Second Quarter Reading List

 Here we go: 

Broome County Public Library

Julian Barnes, Departure(s) A Novel, (2026). This was so good and so unusual I don't know where to start. He's just a master of his craft, and this was his farewell to that craft - he tells us early in the novel it will be his last book. Saying anything more feels like I'm trivializing the lifetime that made this possible. I'm judging all other books against this one, which isn't really fair, but I can't help it. 

Hanging out on our bookshelves

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George, (2005). So, after the masterpiece of Departures, I pulled this off the shelf. Turns out I'd read it before, but couldn't remember most of it. Two sweeping life stories entwined around each other. It was pretty good. Maybe a little stuck and long in places. But impressive. 

Autumn Leaves Used Books, Ithaca

Alvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires, (translator Natasha Wimmer), 2024. I wanted to like this more than I did. It was ambitious and clever and beautiful, with a couple of superb characters. But I got bogged down in the complex palace intrigue and the interconnected layers of conquering forces and lineages. Perhaps that was the point. 

Broome County Public Library

Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees, 2021. Several people told me they loved this, so I was excited to read it. And sure, it had some promise, but honestly needed a couple more drafts and a pushier editor. Characters were flatter than they should have been, and I didn't care about them as much as I was supposed to. It had the feel of YA for Grownups. 

Broome County Public Library

Liz Moore, The God of the Woods, 2025. I don't usually read mystery/crime fiction, but this swept me along with multiple characters all affected by the crime in question. I wanted to know who dunnit, and I wanted to know what happened to all the characters. I don't think it is Great Literature. But it was fun to read and cleverly constructed. 

Look at me using the public library again like a pro. 

Catherine Chidgey, The Book of Guilt, 2025. Chidgey is a New Zealand author who has been on my radar for a while and I finally found her at the library in Binghamton. Very readable, asks some important questions about what we're capable of, uses Point of View skillfully, I enjoyed reading it, but it didn't stick with me and I'm struggling to find interesting things to say about it. 

Broome County Public Library

Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In The Dark, 2022. I feel like I've read a lot of books lately that sweep through multiple generations to try explore the current human existential crisis. Okay, maybe it has only been three or four books like that. I think I find them hard because I am just getting to understand a character and then the story moves on. This is a totally valid way to tell stories and I get how a writer gets fascinated with examining an issue or question from multiple perspectives, I just don't think it is my favorite structure as a reader. 

 Broome County Public Library. Again! 

Anne De Marcken, It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over, 2022. Spoiler alert, I don't think it is actually over, and I don't know how it ever can be because this is a book about an immortal zombie. It is intensely interior meditation on life and death with a dreamy quality, unmoored from reality (even more than you might expect from a novel about a zombie). But its cleverness never really stopped being the focus of the writing. 

On the shelves at the lake rental house in Alpena, Michigan, where we stayed last week. I read it while we were there, then put it back on the shelf for the next guests. 

Daniel Mason, North Woods, 2023. Not only have I read a good number of sweeping-through-long-expanses-of-time books lately, I've also read a good number of look-at-us-destroying-the-world books. They're an understandable preoccupation in this day and age, but they do get a little rough on a body. Science fiction used to be imagining futures I'd never see, but I might end up seeing some of this. It was lush, dense with descriptions of the woods, and Mason did manage to tie a lot of the characters together across time using multiple different story-telling approaches, which I enjoyed (in a wistful kind of way), and also appreciated because I was a bit disappointed when I realized that we were moving fast through each character's time period. I got a little drunk on it, and I'm carrying that North Woods hangover (I had a good time and now I have a bit of a headache and need a glass or two of water) into the book I'm halfway through right now - Richard Power's Playground - also lushly grounded in a physical world we're in the middle of losing. But that's a story for another post.

2026: Saturday June 27: Lake Huron

2022: Lake Michigan; 2023: Lake Superior; 2024: Lake Erie; 2025: Lake Ontario

2026: Lake Huron

Somehow five summers have gone by and we are on our fifth and final Great Lake vacation with Shaun and Steve. We are at Lake Huron, on the east coast of the state of Michigan, on a curving peninsula that has us facing west, so we get sunsets. 

This year Steve brought a telescope

We are engaging in age-appropriate activities: 

We haven't seen anything new to our life lists, but still, Great Egrets and Common Mergansers are never not cool.

Who among us can resist a pretty rock? There are rocks in piles on the deck, on window sills, in the bathroom, lined up along bookshelves. All the rocks gathered by holiday makers before us, their collectors persuaded that no, there is no more room in the car to bring any more rocks home. All the rocks that were too precious and special to throw back to the lake now left in drifts around the house.

Shaun found this shell fossil rock on the shore. 

Now, this has been quite enough computer time considering I'm on vacation, so excuse me, but I am going back to my book and jigsaw puzzle for the rest of the afternoon.  

2026: Sunday June 21: Solstice

It is Father's Day here in the US of A. I know little about the origins of the holiday, but I am assuming it is as made up and commercially-driven as Mother's Day (No, it doesn't get exhausting being this cynical. You get used to it.).  But that doesn't negate the fact that fathers are important for all the reasons. 

Here are a couple of good ones: 

This is a photo of a photo that I took in a hurry, so sorry about the quality. It is somewhere in Central Otago, 1977-ish? Bill, Peter, Sandra, Me, Nick. The reason I am showing you this particular one is because you need to know there was a time my father wore red pants and a red shirt at the same time while on holiday.

Michael and Ella, 2003-ish. I mean, come on, what cuties. 

2026: Sunday June 13: Trains

 TL;DR: Trains are cool. There should be more trains, in real life and in stories. Trains have been historically problematic. 

Santa Barbara, CA

Yesterday the largest steam engine in the country rolled through Binghamton on an America's 250th Cross Country tour, and everyone in town went crazy. I mean, they acted like they'd been fanatical trainspotters since childhood. Michael and I drove to Ithaca at peak-Big Boy time, and as we were driving out of town, Michael pointed at all the cars pulled over on a side road waiting for Big Boy to pass and said, Wow. Owego took forever to get through because every person in a fifty mile radius appeared to have taken their child out of school to watch the passing. Lots of men with fancy camera gear. I texted my friend who lives in Owego with an lol comment and she replied that she'd taken a sick day to watch, and sent me a cool video of the engine wooshing through Campville. I was like, I co-taught with you for ten years and I never heard you mention a train once, oh, except for that time you took a train to Florida and the other time you took a train to South Dakota, so I guess you do kind of like trains, ok, you get a pass, but why aren't all these other people out in force demanding we get high speed commuter rail through Broome County? 

Michael and Ella on the Sugar Cane Train, Maui, HI

If we had a train here, I would take it all the time. I love riding trains, as I tell you every time I go to New York via Beacon and Metro North down the Hudson River. You get to see the back-sides of towns, the parts no-one is supposed to see. You get to fall asleep somewhere hours out of Sydney and wake up to mobs of kangaroos hopping across barren landscapes and still not be even close to your destination (yes, that is something I did).

Me scouting for a forward facing window seat, Grand Central Station, New York, NY

I spent most of January slogging my way through Dickens' Dombey and Son, and boy, are there trains in that book. Dickens lived through the transformation of the English city, town, and countryside wrought by trains, and they're a big part of the Dombey family story, it must have been insane to see the world change like that, not always for the better. I am teaching a two semester grad seminar on United States history starting this Fall, and you bet we're going to talk about trains. How the federal government funded and facilitated the spread of railroads across North America, allowing a few corrupt men to amass vast personal fortunes, alienating Native Americans from land, leading to crises in debt for farmers. Etcetera. 

Michael admiring his childhood train set, made by a shop class in St Maries, ID. 

The book I am trying to write currently starts and ends at Binghamton's Lackawanna Railroad Station, which is not something I consciously planned, but makes perfect sense because trains are symbols of arriving and leaving and strangers and progress running you down. 

One of my favorite trains from literature is in Richard Adams, Watership Down, one of the top five books of my life. Captain Holly describes their escape from Efrafa. "What I'm going to say now is the cold truth. Lord Frith sent one of his great Messengers to save us..."

Sorry if this doesn't hang together. I'm finishing it in a hurry because. 

2026: Sunday June 7: Allie

I was Allie's 12th grade social studies teacher and since I'm friends with her parents, yesterday I went to her college graduation party. Some people know what they want early, and they go at it, and they get it. Allie wanted to be a music teacher when I taught her, and here she is, about to start a new job as a middle school band teacher at a local school. We talked about the band room being a haven for some students, we talked about music building team work skills, we also talked about music being something we teach because hey, it's music and it is part of being human and doesn't need to be justified in non-musical terms.

Me and Allie. I made her take the selfie because I always assume younger people are better at that than me. I will resist making an old-person comment about fashion coming around again in regard to the hair style of the person behind me. I mean, it's not like I'm doing anything interesting with my own hair.

 

Ella's high school band teacher was there and I got to thank him for providing a creative space for her to grow and explore in. I also got to answer the "what is Ella up to now" question several times. Oh, no big deal, just Yale, you know, following her passions. Then, because Allie's family are all from Brooklyn, I threw in a casual comment about Ella subletting in Park Slope for the summer and one of Allie's uncles strolled over and asked how much a one-bedroom in Park Slope was going for these days and I pretended I understood the nuances of Brooklyn neighborhoods. (Ok, I know Park Slope is nice, but that's about as far as my awareness goes).