I wrote this column in April, 2009, following the funeral of a friend.  I add it to this blog because, well, I want to keep it around.
I would tell the truth here if I knew what it was.
This is what I do know: An old friend is dead.  Kathy, Stephen, Matt and I went to [...]

Tom Rob Smith’s novel, The Secret Speech, is a sometimes gruesome thriller wrapped around moral, and ultimately theological, issues of guilt, redemption and justice.  Like his first novel, Child 44, The Secret Speech is set in the Soviet Union and features the heroic but haunted Leo Demidov.  A former member of the MGB, Stalin’s brutal [...]

Home is memory.  That seems obvious enough.  Home is that place where what was is.
Maybe you have lived in the same place all your life.  Then home is a vast library or treasure trove or landfill of moments, voices, smells.  Spirits fill the rooms, line the streets, walk beside you.  More years in a place [...]