Notes From A Bear's Journey

     The world of dreams is an odd place, odd in the sense that for me it is oddly welcoming as if each night I walk into a grand terminal of some sort and not know where I'm supposed to go.  Recently my dreams have been growing a bit closer to home.  Here's one from the other night, me seeing an old friend (he's been gone for nearly 40 years now) and me saying to him, "It's been awhile since I've seen you."  Or in another dream, I was telling an unknown woman that I'd been in this dream before, even filling her in on the details I had missed (which she agreed was what happened).  Then there was the dream awhile back of my home when I was in grade school, a dream so vivid that I took copious notes about it as if it would have some meaning at a later date.  I used to do that, take notes of my dreams long ago --the dialogue, the changing scenes, the people and/or animals I had encountered-- but it soon began taking up hours of time each morning....

     The new year came and the old year went, although we missed it; our local stations opted to drop the practice of showing the ball drop in Times Square (on the east coast and thus 2 hours ahead of us) in favor of showing the 10 o'clock news and how many highway patrol officers were out and doing DUI (drunk driving) tests.  My wife and I were already in bed reading.  Earlier I had struggled to open a new container of salad dressing, one with that plastic-sealed top that you peel off, the ones that sometime appear to be glued on.   How are the older people supposed to deal with this, I muttered to my wife, and then realized that perhaps I was struggling because well, I was  that "older" person.  Dang.  But earlier we had had dinner, poured a glass of champagne, and settled in to enjoy "our" new year's by watching (again) the old Return to Paradise concert by the 70s group, Styx .  It only added to our break from scanning through ...

     Back in the days of old Hollywood, when film arrived on bulky reels and directors used cheerleading-type megaphones, you'd hear that call at the end: that's a wrap!  Or so I thought.  Such a phrase didn't enter the film industry until 1970 (what was I thinking?).  Here's how one etymology site listed the origins of the word "wrap" (for the noun, anyway):  late 15c., "fine cloth used as a cover or wrapping for bread." ...a type of women's garment, recorded from 1827..."plastic film or cellophane used as a wrap" is from 1930..."end of a filming session" is attested from 1970..."sandwich material folded up in flour tortilla" is by 1998.  But jump to the verb's beginnings and wrap --as in "let's wrap it up" (meaning, said the site, to "put an end to"-- can be dated back to 1926).  Cecil B. , where are you?      But since this was the holiday season, the story of wrapping paper (not lite...

    It is nearing the holiday season, even if Thanksgiving here in the US came and went in true capitalistic fashion (gobble down your turkey, scarf your pie, and move on to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and, as if to assuage the guilt, cap it off with Giving Tuesday).   Stores used to celebrate that day of giving thanks; but now it seems that once the Halloween candy sales end, it's time for them to immediately clear the aisles and start putting up the Christmas items...as far as Thanksgiving goes, well, the turkeys are somewhere there in the back cooler.  But the holidays near this time --Kwanzaa, Hanukkah,* and Christmas-- are truly about being a time of giving, not so much material things as retailers emphasize here, but of yourself; these days are a time to simply pause and reflect on what you have in your life, be it your health or family or time to share with others.  As Smithsonian wrote about Kwanzaa, the first principal is: Umoja (Unity):  To s...

      Sometimes the world is so full of news --good and bad-- that you may tend to wonder why you  watch or read it.  Personally, I find myself asking this question with certain books or issues of magazines such as The New Yorker, or the "best of" series of books, often finding them so interesting and thus, time-consuming, that I occasionally hope that an article or story would  not  be worth reading, if only so I could move on to another.  And then a recommendation or a reviewer makes such decisions even more difficult.  Take this quick review of the book, Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine by Kevin Wilson : Once in India I saw what looked like a chrome rainbow wasp, so pretty I reached out to touch it, unaware it would sting.  Wilson's writing is like that, especially in this short-story collection -- so kind and funny you don't even see the knife.  I ordered the book ...       Another review on Stewart O'Nan's book, The Ni...