Before my family left the state to escape mob reprisals, I spent the first of my Wonder Bread Years in a small, river valley town called East Liverpool, on the easternmost edge of Ohio, right where Pennsylvania and West Virginia bump up against it. Baby boomers like me easily forget how childhood in those days…
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Not only am I struck by the contrast, I’m actually moved by it. In a week when soccer nuts are literally killing each other, I’m seeing cycling nuts, as well as folks who may care very little about cycling, all crowded together by the roadside; by the Mediterranean coastal highways of Corsica; by the narrow,…
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Frida Kahlo would have been 106 years old today. I noted the anniversary a year ago as part of my series, Born To Be Wild, which marked the birthdays of noteworthy artists and appeared on Vine, the blog at Wisteria.com. Twenty years ago, in an exhibition of Mexican surrealists and before I even knew she existed, I…
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Warning: the following post contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some viewers. Even I squirm a little just thinking about it. Only what bothered me wasn’t watching a surgical incision being made inches away. Or seeing a doctor insert large, pokey, stainless steel objects into another person’s abdomen. Or even the blood. No, I squirm…
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THIS IMAGE reminds me of something. Many of us have experienced that predicament in which we’re genuinely convinced our life is about to end. For me it came in December of 1997, very near the place in this photo. After a two-hour drive over “the desert road” and a weekend in Alexandria, I told my…
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VERNACULAR. Language. I don’t know about you, but I’ve long been fascinated by these things. The morphing of meaning over time. Dirty words and what makes them dirty. Dialects. How you can be saying one thing and I’m hearing something else. I think that fascination has been with me since childhood, certainly from the time…
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HERE I AM GETTING LOST on my bike, as observed from a United States Department of Defense Global Positioning Satellite in orbit more than 10,000 miles above the surface of the earth. This is such a Peyton Place; you can’t do anything around here without somebody getting all up in your stuff. I started cycling…
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MEMORIAL DAY of 2012, I became a grandfather for the very first time. Other proud grandfathers might have passed around snapshots, or maybe cigars. I’m a writer. So I wrote. Wisteria is a family kinda place, and Vine, the blog at Wisteria.com provided me the perfect opportunity to post an interview I did with my…
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“A Car Guy’s Words To Live By: Wisdom For Men Who Like To Fix Stuff” was a list I originally wrote as an in-store branding campaign for a national auto parts retailer. I’m resurrecting it here to mark Father’s Day and to honor the memory of my own dad. James Frank Starr was sort of…
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BORN TO BE WILD was a series of posts I wrote to mark the birthdays of noteworthy artists. It ran on Vine, the original name of the blog at Wisteria.com (now Storyboard). This particular piece, about a sculpture by Paul Gauguin, first appeared in June of 2012. “I have this thing for a Tahitian girl. I…
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