by Richard Rothman | Jan 4, 2021 | Musings
This is an account of how, at the age of 61, I found myself whining with frustration, afraid of humiliating myself, and then fired by my piano teacher—all part of a journey that’s nevertheless been a highlight of these twilight years. After traipsing around the...
by Richard Rothman | Aug 20, 2020 | Musings
It began on Christmas in Dobbs Ferry, New York when I was about six, which would have been 1958. I woke my sister Debbie before dawn to get a jump on opening presents. Ripping away the wrapping paper, I discovered a book around the size of a comic book: the Trapp...
by Richard Rothman | Aug 4, 2020 | Musings
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a loon. She made a fool of me. It was August of 1978, on the first day of a 100 mile canoe trip with my college roommate on the iconic Allagash River in northern Maine–the same trip Thoreau memorialized in his Maine Woods...
by Richard Rothman | Jul 17, 2020 | Musings
6:15 am, June 17, 2020Poland, MaineWhoosh! A loud fluttering sounded over the chorus of chirping birds that had already awakened me. Turning quickly to my right, I looked out the large picture window and caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a duck in flight headed...
by Richard Rothman | May 11, 2020 | Musings
I spent a weekend in Manhattan back in the fall of 2018 with two old college friends: Leslie, a documentary filmmaker who’s lived in Paris for many years, and Bonnie, a recently-retired high school English teacher living on a cattle ranch in the Kansas Flint Hills and...
by Richard Rothman | Apr 26, 2020 | Musings
I like to think of them as my trees, two sibling white birches rising out of the bank of Thompson Lake in Poland, Maine. They arch towards the water, just a few yards beyond the screen porch from which I’ve watched them grow since their infancy. I probably shouldn’t...
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