James A. Reeves
My watercolor painting.1One of my most valuable possessions is the pawn my father carved eleven years ago to replace the one we’d lost from our chess set. We'd fallen into the habit of playing at the hospital while we waited for his new lung, and he whittled the pawn quickly. I can still see the...
James A. Reeves
Earl and his truck1But I'm still thinking about beauty, how it is incidental and cannot be contrived. Perhaps this is why I've suddenly become obsessed by the loose strangeness of Leonardo Da Vinci's Adoration of Magi, which I recently re-encountered in a Ken Burns documentaryLa pittura è mentale,...
James A. Reeves
1Nine years ago, I was unexpectedly alone in Rome so I spent the day at the Barberini, where I consumed so much Bernini and Caravaggio that my brain was stunned into silence by all that fleshy marble and bloody oil. When I reemerged into daylight, something shimmered at the edge of my vision, a...
James A. Reeves
1At my Thursday night Men's Spirituality Book Club, we've been debating the recovery cliché that "acceptance is the answer," which sounds so limp and lazy.But I'm learning that acceptance is not passive. Wearing the world as a loose garment requires a difficult and oftentimes exhausting stance...
James A. Reeves
1Parking garages are the most frequent setting for my dreams. Sometimes they are crumbling. Sometimes they are flooded. Sometimes I find my parents there. I'm always trying to find my car. Last night I dreamt I was walking the jetway to an enormous Korean airplane when I keeled over because of an...
James A. Reeves
1My first memory is sitting in a high chair in front of a small Zenith television. The opening credits for a sitcom played, maybe Happy Days or Laverne & Shirley, and there was a shenanigan that involved kissing a mannequin. It scared the hell out of me, and I screamed until my father patted...