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The House Walsh Built
David Walsh is a gambler. He has a savant-like ability to count cards. For a while, that gift enabled Walsh to amass a fortune. Some of that money he’s spent on living large. The rest he’s plowed into buying art, a lot of art, so much art that Walsh had to build a special purpose…
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Dirt
Dirt can’t be art, can it? Art is the stuff we see in museums, guarded by plexiglass and motion detection cameras. Or maybe you know some high-end folks who collect the stuff. Paintings, snuff boxes, whatever. That art may be valuable or not. You might like it or not. You have to study art in…
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Seoul
A year ago today, I was in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. This was month 2 of a round-the-world trip that lasted 7 months. My husband and I were following an itinerary I had crafted using novels I had read and upended by whatever happened to cross our path. That trip feels like a…
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Re-Entry
I thought my travel days were over. A 7 month long round-the-world trip should be enough to sate anyone’s wanderlust. And then there’s the pandemic. Today, infection rates in Europe remain at a low simmer with occasional flare-ups in places like Barcelona and Antwerp. By contrast, the US is at a rolling boil with Los…
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Road Trip
Whenever I come to Los Angeles, I spend a lot of time on the road. It is, after all, the Californian way of life. To sit in your car for hours at a time to get to and from work. Then spend a few hours more to arrive at dinner, a movie or a night…
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At the Zoo
I’m unreasonably excited to visit the zoo. We haven’t been in years though, when the kids were little, we went to Artis almost every week. But neither nostalgia nor a new-found interest in the animal kingdom is making my heart beat faster. It’s the prospect of an outing in lockdown week 13. There are, of…
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Creature Comforts
Last week, an article caught my husband’s eye. The main photo displays a Japanese hearth sunken into the wooden floor — the irori, a place where family and guests gather to share tea or a meal. A cast-iron tea kettle hangs above the flame. A tripod awaits the stone pot containing the evening meal. Floor…
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Writing on the Road
On the road sounds mythic, doesn’t it? Think about Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Or, if you’ve been binge-watching old movies these days, you’ll know all about Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on the road to some place exotic. Writing while on the road is a whole other ball of wax. Could I do…
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Quiet
The dust falls from our travel boots. Laundry slouches in uncertain heaps. After 7 months on the road, the curious monkey returns to Amsterdam. Everything is the same. Nothing is the same. We’ve come home in a time of coronavirus. It’s so quiet here. The freeway doesn’t hum. The birds no longer compete with the…