Tag: Memories

Footprints In Time — On Sale This Week

My memoir Footprints In Time is on a Kindle Countdown Deal this week. If you’ve been meaning to grab it, now’s the time — and Kindle Unlimited readers can read it free.

I wanted to share a moment from one of the chapters — a stretch of life that still sits heavy in my memory. It was Biloxi, right after Camille tore through the coast, when everything felt raw and unsettled and we were just trying to keep moving.

“And for us, it was another chapter in that wild, dangerous, beautiful stretch of life with Joannie and the kids — the years when we lived on nerve, instinct, and whatever the universe handed us. Camille didn’t stop us. She just became part of the story.

Camille moved on, but something in the air around us didn’t settle. You can feel it when another storm is forming — not wind, not rain, just that quiet dread that sits behind your ribs. We left Biloxi carrying that feeling west, and it followed us straight into the next trouble waiting under the bright lights.”

follow the link to the book: https://a.co/d/09t0S86m

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Fay “Honey” Knopp: Quaker, Abolitionist, Prison Visitor

And She Was My Friend

I still remember the first time Fay “Honey” Knopp walked into the visiting room at Danbury FCI, carrying this strange little bubble of gentleness into a place built to crush it. Visiting rooms in federal joints all smell the same — burnt coffee, disinfectant, old linoleum, and the quiet hum of resignation — but Honey had a way of making the air feel different, like she’d opened a window nobody else could see. She wasn’t dramatic, wasn’t trying to save anybody in some big cinematic way. She just sat down across from me with her notebook and her Quaker calm, and suddenly the place didn’t feel quite so much like a cage.

Those visits mattered. They still do. They were a lifeline tossed across concrete and razor wire, and I grabbed on like a drowning man. And here’s the thing Honey didn’t just visit me. She visited all of us — the war resisters, the conscientious objectors, the ones who refused to pick up a gun and got locked up for it. She made her rounds like a minister of mercy, and she didn’t care if the world thought we were troublemakers or traitors or fools. She showed up anyway.

And when I came out — when I finally walked out of Danbury with that strange mix of relief and disorientation that hits you the moment the gate clanks shut behind you — Honey threw me a coming‑out party at her home. Imagine that. A party. For a guy just out of federal prison. She did it for all of us, every war resister who stepped back into the world blinking like we’d been underwater too long. Her house became this unofficial harbor, a place where you could breathe again, where you weren’t defined by your inmate number, where you could sit at her table and feel human.

Years later, when I learned more about her life, I realized I’d been sitting with a legend and didn’t even know it. Honey Knopp wasn’t just a kind soul with a notebook. She was born in Bridgeport in 1918, valedictorian, art school, New School, UCLA — a whole life of curiosity before she ever set foot in a prison. She found her calling at a Quaker peace demonstration in ’39 and never stopped walking toward the fire: pacifism, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, all stitched together by this stubborn belief that human beings could be better than the systems we built.

By the mid‑50s she was visiting imprisoned conscientious objectors. By ’62 she was in Geneva telling the world to stop poisoning children with nuclear fallout. And in ’68 — the year the country was tearing itself apart — she co‑founded Prisoner Visitation and Support, the very program that eventually brought her to me. She built a national network so people locked away by the government wouldn’t disappear into silence.

Then came the ’70s, and Honey started talking abolition — real abolition — before it was fashionable or even understandable to most folks. She wrote Instead of Prisons, a handbook that basically said: stop building cages, start building communities. Reduce the population. Replace punishment with something that actually heals. She pushed restorative justice before the term had any traction. She worked with sexual offenders, too — not because it was easy or popular, but because she believed you couldn’t help victims if you pretended offenders were monsters instead of broken people who needed treatment.

Honey didn’t flinch from the hard stuff. She walked straight into it with her notebook and her faith and her unshakeable belief that mercy wasn’t weakness — it was the strongest force on earth.

There’s a school named after her now, and the Safer Society Foundation still carries her torch. But for me, her legacy isn’t in the institutions or the programs. It’s in those quiet afternoons in Danbury, and in that coming‑out party at her home — the one where she welcomed me back into the world like I was a long‑lost nephew instead of a guy fresh out of federal custody.

Honey Knopp walked into prisons with nothing but compassion and walked out leaving seeds behind — seeds she planted in people like me. Seeds that still grow. She showed up when the world said we were disposable. She showed up when it mattered.

And I’ll never forget it.

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Brigitte Bardot: The Timeless Beauty Who Fought for Animals

Born today, September 28th, 1934 — Brigitte Bardot, the woman who once lit up my quiet Staten Island nights and later proved her beauty meant something because she fought like hell for animals.

I used to sneak out to the TV room late at night when we lived on Staten Island, moving slow so the floorboards wouldn’t betray me. The whole neighborhood went silent after dark — that deep suburban hush where even the refrigerator sounded like it was breathing. I’d keep the TV turned down low, just enough to catch the outline of her. Brigitte Bardot. My first lust, my first love, the first woman who made something warm and confusing rise in my chest before I even knew what desire was. I never got over her. You don’t get over the first person who teaches you that beauty can hit like a wave.

She’d appear on the screen like she wasn’t entering a movie but stepping into the room with me. Even in black‑and‑white she carried her own sunlight. Bardot didn’t act — she existed, and you felt it. She moved with that loose, natural confidence, like she didn’t care whether the world approved or not. And I’d sit there in the dim glow, the whole house asleep, watching her with the kind of focus only a kid discovering something powerful can have.

There was a quiet sensuality in her, something that made you lean forward without meaning to. Not loud, not cheap — just a presence that pulled you in. The way she held her face, the way her eyes lingered, the way she carried herself like she knew exactly who she was. She made those quiet Staten Island nights feel bigger, warmer, more alive. She made me feel alive.

As I got older, I learned the rest — the fame, the storms, the way she walked away from the industry at the height of her power. But what stayed with me most wasn’t the movies. It was the stand she took for animals. When she left acting behind and threw herself into protecting creatures who had no voice, she showed a different kind of beauty — the kind that comes from conviction. She fought hard, loud, and without apology. That mattered to me. Still does. There’s a strength in choosing compassion, and she chose it over and over again.

Now, at this point in my life, I can say it plain: I’d want a woman with a body that carries its own kind of beauty, sure — but also a good heart. Someone with that mix Bardot had: presence and principle. Warmth and backbone. A person who doesn’t just look good in a photograph but stands for something when it counts.

Even now, when I see an old photo of her — that tousled hair, that steady gaze, that sense she was already halfway to someplace freer — I feel that same quiet heat again. That first spark. That first awakening. Some memories fade. Some loves soften. But Bardot, in her own way, stayed.

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My Book

Good morning everyone

And the rest of the story now available at https://a.co/d/0iCnPaNX

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Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey’s birthday rolls around today — kid came squalling into the world out in La Junta, Colorado back in ’35, but he really grew up wild in Oregon, the real Oregon, not the brochure. Him and his brother Chuck tearing down the Willamette River like they were trying to outrun the sun. Swimming, fishing, wrestling the rapids, wrestling each other, wrestling life itself. The guy was built like somebody who didn’t mind getting punched in the face if it meant a good story later.

In high school they tagged him “most likely to succeed,” which is funny, because Kesey’s idea of success was never the one the guidance counselor had taped to the wall. He goes off to Stanford to study creative writing — sure, fine — but then he ends up at the VA hospital in Menlo Park making seventy‑five bucks a day letting doctors pump him full of LSD and whatever other alphabet‑soup chemicals they were cooking up. Seventy‑five bucks in the early ’60s! That’s rent, groceries, and a couple nights of trouble.

He stuck around afterward as a night attendant in the psych ward, wandering those fluorescent hallways while the world slept. That’s where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came from — not theory, not academia, but the real deal: human beings cracked open, stitched together, trying to make sense of the noise in their heads. The title came from an old kids’ rhyme: “One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” Simple, spooky, perfect.

Pauline Kael said the book had the whole damn era packed inside it — Vietnam, campus revolts, drugs, the counterculture — all before the country even realized it was about to blow its gasket. Kesey wasn’t predicting the future; he was already living in it.

And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, he fell in with a little San Francisco band called the Grateful Dead. They weren’t legends yet — just a bunch of long‑haired kids with amps that hummed like beehives and a drummer who looked like he’d been born in a thunderstorm. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters pulled the Dead into the Acid Tests, those wild, neon‑soaked nights where music wasn’t just played, it was summoned. The Dead became the house band for the psychedelic revolution, and Kesey was the ringmaster, the guy stirring the punch bowl and the consciousness of everyone in the room. Garcia once said Kesey didn’t just open doors — he kicked them off the hinges. And Kesey loved the Dead because they weren’t trying to be stars; they were trying to be free. It was a friendship built on noise, color, and the belief that life could be bigger than the box it came in.

Then Hollywood got its hands on Cuckoo’s Nest in ’75, and boom — six Oscars. Jack Nicholson grinning like the devil in a denim jacket. Kesey didn’t love the movie, but that’s another story for another windy day. He wrote Sometimes a Great Notion — big, wet, logging‑town epic — and later Sailor Song, which reads like Alaska got drunk and decided to tell you its secrets.

Kesey was one of those American originals — the kind you don’t get anymore. Half cowboy, half mystic, half troublemaker. Yeah, that’s three halves, but Kesey never fit in the math anyway.

And then there’s the interview — the one I watched again this morning. Not Merv Griffin. Not some slick 1960s talk‑show host with a shiny desk and a band in the corner. No — this was Charlie Rose, 1992. Rose in his suit, leaning forward like he’s about to ask the meaning of life. Kesey sitting across from him, older now, beard gone,hair gray at the edges, wearing a simple dark shirt, no blazer, no tie‑dye, just Kesey as he was — a man who’d lived through the noise and come out the other side with a grin that said he still knew a few secrets the rest of us hadn’t caught up to yet.

It’s a collision of worlds — Rose’s studio polish against Kesey’s Oregon mud. Rose wants to talk literature; Kesey wants to talk life. LSD, rivers, kids, stories, the whole messy American experiment. You can see Rose trying to keep it tidy, but Kesey keeps slipping out of the frame, like a fish that refuses to be caught.

That’s the beauty of it — two men, one chasing understanding, the other chasing freedom. Kesey’s grin says he’s still riding the rapids, still hearing the music under the noise. And somewhere in that studio, between the questions and the laughter, you can feel the ghost of the Willamette River rolling through the lights.

The link to that interview https://youtu.be/BJjNIoODO2k

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When We Happened.


I wrote this while remembering how ordinary moments, a laugh, a glance, a shared silence—can feel sacred once we know they will not return. It is not a poem about loss, but about presence: the way two lives can briefly align, then drift apart while still carrying the echo.

Once upon a time
as the story is told
We happened,
knowing our love
would never grow old.

No soft‑spoken whispers,
just cries of longing,
taking each other by storm,
for once, feeling like belonging.
In all our desperate cries
of yearning

We knew our time
would not last for long,
for like the summer’s burning
One would soon be gone.

We threw off the guides.
and let go the tether,
making the most
of our summers together.

This began as a memory of one woman, but it became something larger — a reflection on all the women who, like me, were searching for a place to belong, even if only for a short while. Some loves arrive when they shouldn’t, some fade before they can settle, yet each leaves a mark that time can’t erase. We happened once, and maybe that was enough — a moment that still burns like summer long after the season has gone.

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    Rating: 1 out of 5.

    1976 — The Year I Came Home to a Place I’d Never Been Before

    Boston — and the whole country — is celebrating 250 years of existence, and at the same time I’m celebrating 50 years since I first came to the place that has always felt like home. Half a century ago I walked into Boston for the first time, not knowing a damn thing about the city except that something in it pulled at me. Now, as the nation marks its big anniversary, I’m marking mine — fifty years in a place I had never been that somehow felt like I had never left.

    Some time in the late days of ’75 or the early days of ’76, I crawled out of a produce dumpster in Baltimore. Yes, really. I was living at Jonah House then, part of the Community for Creative Non‑Violence, and my Sunday duties — along with my friend Phil Berrigan — were to head down to the produce terminal and gather all the discarded fruits and vegetables. The terminal had this rule: if anything hit the ground, it had to be thrown out. Didn’t matter if it was a perfect apple or a bruised banana. Somehow it never occurred to them to wash it and give it to folks who needed it.

    So Sundays were our scavenger days. The terminal was closed, the gates quiet, and Phil and I could climb in and out of dumpsters at will. This wasn’t just picking things off the ground — though there was some of that — it was literal dumpster diving, hoping the bananas hadn’t liquefied and the tomatoes hadn’t turned into soup. We’d haul home whatever we could carry, wash it all, keep what Jonah House needed, then walk the neighborhood leaving bags of good food on doorsteps. We lived in one of the poorest sections of Baltimore, and this was one small way to push back against the madness.

    Anyway, one day I heaved myself up out of that dumpster, and before I knew it, I was heaving myself out of another kind of dumpster — a dump called the Hillbilly Ranch, a country bar in Boston. I had decided to leave Jonah House, take my stepson Jimmy — the courts had given me custody — and make a new life in the town of the original revolutionaries.

    The Hillbilly Ranch sat right on the edge of the Combat Zone, Boston’s old adult‑entertainment district — a few crooked blocks of strip joints, peep shows, porn theaters, massage parlors, and bars that didn’t pretend to be anything other than what they were. The Zone was neon and noise, hustlers and lost souls, cops who looked the other way, and a steady hum of trouble that never quite boiled over but never went cold either. It was the kind of place where the sidewalk felt alive under your feet, where you could smell beer, sweat, perfume, and desperation all mixing together in the humid night air. A carnival of the city’s underbelly, running full tilt just a stone’s throw from the Common.

    And right there, tucked into that chaos, was the Hillbilly Ranch — the first place I walked into in Boston. A country‑western honky‑tonk with wagon wheels nailed to the walls, neon beer signs, wood paneling, and a floor that stuck to your boots. The crowd looked like someone shook the whole city and let whoever fell out land inside: cowboys who weren’t cowboys, bikers, hippies, sailors, Southie hard‑cases, and tourists who had no idea what they’d wandered into.

    It occurs to me now that the movie Road House shows a few scenes that feel like cousins to what the Hillbilly Ranch really was — the neon, the noise, the rough crowd, the band trying to hold the room together while trouble simmered in the corners. But Road House was Hollywood danger, stuntmen and sugar glass, a fantasy of barroom violence dressed up with muscles and movie lighting. The Hillbilly Ranch was all that and more — no stuntmen, no retakes, no Patrick Swayze walking in to clean up the place. Just a real Boston honky‑tonk sitting on the edge of the Combat Zone, fed nightly by the Zone’s parade of characters.

    The bathroom was a trough urinal — no stalls, no sinks, no privacy, no mercy. You went in, did your business, and hoped you didn’t slip.

    But the real heartbeat of the Ranch was the music. Boston had a surprisingly strong country‑western undercurrent back then — not the polished Nashville stuff, but barroom country, Telecasters through cheap amps, fiddles that could cut glass. The Ranch was home base for the local pickers, the guys who played five nights a week and drank six. You’d get bluegrass pickers who’d show up with banjos and mandolins and turn the place into a barn dance, and honky‑tonk trios with drummers who looked like they’d slept in the van.

    Touring road bands came through too — southern and midwestern groups grinding their way up the East Coast. Tight rhythm sections, steel guitar players who could make you cry, singers who’d lived every word they sang. They’d roll in, plug in, and blow the doors off the place.

    And then there were the almost‑famous ones — former sidemen from bigger acts, songwriters who’d had one regional hit, guitar players who’d toured with someone you’d heard of. They’d show up, play their hearts out, and disappear into the night.

    The crowd was part of the show. They leaned right up to the stage — bikers, sailors, hippies, Southie hard‑cases, and lost souls who’d wandered in from the Zone. If the band was good, the room lit up. If the band was bad, the room let them know. It was a working‑class music bar, and the musicians respected that.

    It was loud, sweaty, raw — no fancy lighting, no sound engineer, just a stage, a few amps, and a band trying to win over a room full of characters. It was the kind of place where a fiddle solo could stop a fight, or start one.

    And funny enough, for all the grit and neon and honky‑tonk chaos of the Hillbilly Ranch, my first Fourth of July in Boston was the exact opposite — standing out on the Esplanade at the Hatch Shell, watching Arthur Fiedler conduct what turned out to be his last performance at the Hatch Shell.

    Arthur Fiedler wasn’t just a conductor — he was Boston’s heartbeat in a white jacket. He’d led the Pops for half a century, dragging classical music out of the velvet‑rope concert halls and putting it right in the hands of regular people. He made the Pops a Boston institution, a family tradition, a summer ritual. He believed music belonged to everyone — the dockworkers, the office clerks, the kids running around on the grass — and he played like he was giving the whole city a gift. When Fiedler stepped onto that Hatch Shell stage, Boston showed up. He was as much a part of the city as the Charles River itself.

    One night I’m in a bar where a fiddle solo might start a fight, and a few months later I’m listening to the Boston Pops under the summer sky, the river breathing behind us, the whole city gathered like a family. Boston could swing from rough to beautiful without warning, and I was learning that fast.

    And standing there that night, I knew I had found my new home — a place I had never been that somehow felt like I had never left.

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      White Hall Station

      Sometimes a chapter needs another walk around the block, and this one did. I went back, rewrote it, and finally gave a little mouse named Archibald MacLeash the explanation he deserved. If you’ve read the book, this fills in the cracks. If you haven’t, well—welcome to the neighborhood.

      The night before my induction, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, looking for answers. My heart pounded like I’d just run the 40‑yard dash. A drumbeat I wasn’t sure I could march to — too fast, too loud, too soft, and definitely its own rhythm. But I knew exactly where I did not want to march.

      I tried everything: counting breaths, replaying old football games, thinking of my girlfriend, even astral projection — maybe I could end up on some tropical island, safe and away. I wanted to be anywhere but, in that room, in that bed, wondering where I might be tomorrow night. But dread snuck in under the door and settled in my brain. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of disappearing — of becoming a number, a uniform, a cog in a machine I didn’t believe in.

      The draft lottery — America’s twisted game show of fate — wouldn’t begin until 1969. But in 1964, the draft was still run by local boards, deferments reviewed by hand. At eighteen, I burned my college deferment card, thinking I was making a statement. I wrote letters to President Johnson and to my Staten Island draft board, asking to be reclassified 1‑A. You can’t refuse what you haven’t been offered. And I was tired of hiding behind loopholes, even if I hadn’t meant to hide in the first place.

      By ’69, they granted my wish. I was 1‑A — fit for service, next in line to toe the line, or not. Five years of business schools and seminaries had led me here. From the gridiron to leg irons.

      And then the morning came.

      I was up by 6 a.m. — not that I’d slept. I left a note for my mother saying I’d gone to visit friends. I wondered how long I’d really be gone. I took the bus to the Staten Island Ferry, crossed the Hudson, and walked the two longest blocks of my life to Whitehall Station. Even writing about it now, I can feel that god‑awful sickness in my stomach. I can’t do this.

      Fight or flight? Mine was freeze and sit. No exit. Just a heart pounding like a drumline on speed. I was about to jump off a cliff and couldn’t see the bottom. Compared to this, the Coney Island Parachute Jump was a kiddie ride.

      Whitehall Station sat in lower Manhattan like a bureaucratic bunker — the place where boys became soldiers or tried not to. It shut down in 1972, two days before my birthday, while I was in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. I’d wanted it torn down. I’d done my best to see that happen.

      As I climbed the steps, I saw Mr. Harold Jones waiting outside. My eighth‑grade science teacher — but more than that. Over the years, he’d become my confidant, the one adult who understood what I was feeling. He made science feel like storytelling, helped along by a fictional mouse named Archibald MacLeish who lived in his coat closet. I never saw him, but I saw him. Still do.

      Mr. Jones said he named the mouse Archibald MacLeish after the poet — “because even a mouse can carry big ideas,” he told me once, tapping his temple like he was winding up a thought. MacLeish wrote about truth, about standing your ground when the world tries to bend you, about the kind of dissent that isn’t loud or showy but stubborn and necessary. He believed democracy wasn’t something you admired from a distance — it was something you practiced, even when it cost you. Jones figured a mouse could teach eighth‑graders more about courage and conscience than any textbook. The beret, the cane, the red bandana — that was all me. That’s how I pictured him: a tiny philosopher with a rebel’s wardrobe, the kind of creature who’d whisper, Don’t let them turn you into something you’re not. Archibald showed up whenever I needed him — not as a hallucination, not as a joke, but as a reminder that dissent can be quiet, steady, and small, and still shake the world.

      Mr. Jones didn’t say much that morning. He didn’t have to. He told me to stay who I was. Said it was something to be proud of.

      Inside, the induction ceremony began. The room smelled of sweat. The air was thick with the breath of boys pretending not to shake. The recruiter’s voice was flat, rehearsed, like he’d stopped listening years ago.

      “Please repeat after me…”

      “I do solemnly swear…”

      Repeat. Repeat? Hell, I could barely breathe.

      “…that I will bear true faith…”

      And suddenly I wasn’t in Whitehall anymore. I was back on the football field, hearing my coach yell, “Go in hell‑bent for leather, Little Sandy!” My dad was Big Sandy. The coach used that nickname to rile me up. Hell‑bent for leather — without fear.

      My heart picked up the chant until it drowned out everything else.

      Then came the words: Step forward.

      I sat down.

      The recruiter blinked, confused. Thought I was sick. I stood, breathed, sat again.

      “I’m not moving,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I could even if I wanted to.

      The sergeant’s face turned fire‑engine red. My heart was a jackhammer. I was frozen in defiance — or fear. Maybe both. I prayed he wouldn’t hit me. If he did, I wasn’t sure I could stop myself from hitting back. I may be a peacenik, but I know myself. Anger lives in me too. If I struck him, I wouldn’t be going to jail for trying to end a war, but for starting one.

      Two MPs grabbed me like a sack of potatoes and hauled me to a holding cell. I expected that part. I was prepared. No blows were thrown. An Army lawyer came in to make sure I knew what I was doing. I asked if he knew what he was doing — and what he was part of. He accepted my yes and left.

      Then came the police car, the ride to Staten Island, and my first night in jail. Five miles from the gridiron. A lifetime away.

      As they carried me out of Whitehall, I refused to walk — part of my plan for total non‑cooperation. Mr. Jones stood on the grimy sidewalk. He smiled. Gave me a thumbs‑up. I flashed him a peace sign from between a cop’s holster and his arm.

      And behind him — I swear — I saw Archibald MacLeish strutting down the sidewalk, beret tilted, cane tapping a rhythm only I could hear. He paused near the induction center door, tipped his hat, and whispered, “Courage isn’t loud. It’s the quiet refusal.” Then he vanished into the crowd.

      Mr. Jones arranged to bail me out, though I was released on my own recognizance. I spent the rest of the day at his home — resting, recovering, trying to make sense of what had just happened. And what would happen next. To my mother, I was simply visiting Mr. Jones. I was old enough to say, “Don’t call my parents,” and the authorities obliged.

      A trial date was set for April. The weeks leading up to it blurred into paperwork, legal advice, friends’ advice, and panic. I walked Manhattan like I always had, but now I memorized the cracks in the sidewalk, the rhythm of subway trains, the smell of roasted peanuts from corner carts — anything to anchor me.

      Oddly, I’d always found the Financial District peaceful on a Sunday morning. Wall Street’s insanity gave way to silence. I walked it a few times in those last days. And Times Square — the lights of Broadway weren’t going to shine on me, but they still shine inside my memory. So do the beaches of Staten Island.

      I didn’t know what I was looking for. Only that it wasn’t in New York anymore.

      And so the city’s noise faded behind me. The cracks in the sidewalks, the drumbeat of the subway, even Broadway’s lights became part of a memory I carried but could no longer live inside.

      What I needed was silence. Steadiness. A place where the ground didn’t demand allegiance.

      Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could still hear Archibald’s cane tapping — that quiet rhythm he kept for me when I couldn’t keep one for myself. He’d been at Whitehall, and he’d be on the mountain too. Courage travels light.

      Emily’s mountain was waiting. Quiet, immovable, patient — just like she was — offering refuge without question.

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      Archibald the Mystical Mouse

      I’ve been thinking since March 5th of 2026, when I published my book, that I should rewrite it — not because I expect sales to suddenly skyrocket, but because I left out some things, explanations that would have mattered. Like the fact that I have this mystical mouse named Archibald MacLeish who shows up in the beginning. I just assumed everyone would sort of get it, and then it started occurring to me, over and over again, that no, not everyone does get it. What’s the big deal about the mouse?

      So let me say it plainly.

      In my book, I talk about this make‑believe mouse named Archibald MacLeish. He’s a small, mystical presence who slips in and out of the story, but the name itself comes from something real in my life. Back in school, my science teacher kept a classroom mouse, and he named that little creature Archibald MacLeish. At the time, I didn’t know much about the man behind the name, but my teacher did — and he believed in giving things names that meant something.

      Later, I learned who the real Archibald MacLeish was — an American poet who wrote about democracy as something you do, not something you admire from a distance. He believed in dissent, in thinking for yourself, in the dignity of choosing your own path.

      So the mouse in my book is that mouse — the one supporting my dissent. Not just the classroom mouse, and not just the poet, but the whole chain of belief behind it: a teacher who saw something in me, a poet who stood for freedom of thought, and a reminder that even the smallest presence can carry a big idea.

      That’s the namesake. That’s the reason. That’s why the mouse is Archibald MacLeish. That’s why he shows up at the induction center.

      And I should have explained that as an introduction to the little guy — why he’s there and given him the honor and the dues he deserved. I think folks would have felt the depth of his presence.

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      Dan Sanders — Born May 20

      I write about people’s birthdays, so I figured I’d give this guy a try.

      Dan Sanders was born on May 20 in Knoxville, Tennessee, and before he knew much of anything he was hauled into the strange hum of Oak Ridge — the Atomic City, where the sidewalks were clean, the secrets were thick, and the grown‑ups talked in half‑sentences. He spent his first ten years there, learning early that the world doesn’t always tell you the truth straight on.

      Then came the moves, one after another, the kind of drifting that teaches a kid to keep his eyes open and his back to the wall. Eventually he landed in New York City with his parents, a place loud enough to either swallow you whole or teach you how to stand your ground. He chose standing.

      When the Vietnam War came calling, he not only didn’t answer — he sent a resounding NO echoing through the induction center, loud enough that the walls probably still remember it. And the country made him pay for that honesty. He spent time in federal prison for refusing the war, learning a different kind of geography: steel bars, long nights, and the strange brotherhood of men who wouldn’t bend. It didn’t break him. It sharpened him.

      He made his way from New York to Boston, where he built a quieter life without ever losing the grit of where he came from. Over the years he became a broadcaster, a writer, a guy who pays attention to the small moments most people walk right past. His work — whether memoir, poetry, or the stories he tells out loud — carries that mix of blunt honesty and dry wit that only comes from a life actually lived, not imagined.

      Born on this day, May 20, Dan Sanders grew up between the secrets of Oak Ridge, the chaos of New York, the hard lessons of prison, and the hard‑earned calm of Boston — carrying all of it in the way he writes, remembers, and tells the truth as he sees it.

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      Self-Promotion

      Fifty‑five of you have hit that “subscribe” button, and I’m grateful for every one of you. Maybe you’re here for the stories, maybe for the memories, maybe because something I wrote once made you stop and think. Whatever brought you here, I’m glad you’re still with me.

      Lately I’ve been thinking about how strange it is to promote yourself. It feels like standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign that says, “I wrote a thing, would you mind reading it?” And yet here I am again, doing exactly that.

      I’ve spent a lifetime telling stories — on the air, on the page, in the quiet corners of my mind — and somehow they keep spilling out. Some of them turn into poems. Some turn into books. Some just sit with me until they decide what they want to be. But every time I share one, I feel a little less alone in the world, and maybe you do too.

      So this is me, waving from the dock, saying thank you for sticking around. Thank you for reading, for listening, for letting me ramble. If something I write makes you think, or laugh, or remember something you thought you’d forgotten, then this whole strange exercise in self‑promotion is worth it.

      And just so there’s no confusion: the link below goes to my memoir — ten years of my life, the most dramatic ones — gathered into a book I’m proud of.

      I’ll keep walking through my mind. You keep stopping by when you can. Seems like a fair deal.

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      Wavy Gravy Was Born Today

      Some people arrive in this world like a whisper. Wavy Gravy showed up like a marching band that took a wrong turn and decided to stay.

      Born on this day in 1936, back when the world was still in black‑and‑white, he somehow grew into one of the most colorful human beings to ever wander through the American story. Hugh Romney was the name on the paperwork, but the universe had other plans. It needed a jester. A peacekeeper. A clown with a conscience. A man who could talk down a crowd of 400,000 hungry, muddy, half‑mad festival‑goers at Woodstock with nothing but a microphone and a grin.

      He fed people. He calmed people. He made them laugh when they were ready to break. He turned compassion into a kind of performance art, and he never stopped believing that humor could be a tool for survival. The Hog Farm, the Seva Foundation, the endless parade of red noses and tie‑dye — it was all part of the same mission: make the world a little lighter, a little kinder, a little more human.

      Wavy Gravy reminds us that you can take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously. That mischief can be mercy. That joy can be a form of resistance. And that sometimes the best way to keep the peace is to show up dressed like a psychedelic Santa Claus and tell everyone it’s going to be okay.

      On the day he was born, the universe clearly decided it needed more color. And all these years later, we’re still living in the glow.

      From Rambling Harbor, where the tide rolls in with its own kind of cosmic joke, I tip my hat to the man who proved you can change the world with a laugh and a ladle.

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