Love, Death, and Transience:

Letters from Dad to Family and Friends

A collage in art is something like a mosaic. It takes picture fragments which have a certain meaning in themselves and juxtaposes them with other picture fragments that convey a somewhat different, but related, idea. When viewed as a collective whole, the sub-themes in each picture blend together to create a large unified master theme. This book might be described as a literary collage. The theme in each essay conveys a part of the life of our society and political landscape. The essays were written to accompany e-mail greetings for my four daughters and several of my friends at the four seasonal turning points of the year, experienced similarly at the middle latitudesthe two equinoxes and two solstices. Now, some nine years after starting the practice in 2006, a number of essays have accumulatedsome short and personal and others longer and impersonal. The essays usually make some point about the world that we live infrom the way that words convey meaning, to phenomena of the mind, to political issues of the day. The purpose of this book is to stimulate thought and to encourage discussion.