Edges of my Life.

3rd June, 1985 One of the perks of journalism, particularly in overseas Bureaus, was the opportunity to pick your stories and rub shoulders with history and the past. I was on assignment with Ray Martin and David Brill for Australian Broadcasting and we were on the road with Eugene McCarthy on the way to the Hollywood  Bowl in LA. As well as a skilled and idealistic politician, McCarthy was a published poet and we’d already filmed him in his Washington DC office as part of a profile. Eugene McCarthy ran for president as  peace candidate in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War. Many years later I wrote in my diary: “CBS reports on the CIA and army disinformation campaign during Vietnam War. Seems General Westmoreland continuously underestimated allied troop casualties by as much as one-half to give President Johnson the feeling that America was winning the war. How many thousands were killed because of this?”. I remember that hot afternoon at the Hollywood Bowl in southe...

  Through the glass door, the deck is thick with snow and last summer’s chairs still standing casting shadows like a David Hockney painting.  The snow. And the bare brown trees, the green pines sprinkled  white up the hill on the other side. An old brown barn, then a wide open snow-filled space to the tree line and soft, gray clouds rolling from the west casting shadows across the landscape.    This morning I saw a Blue Jay flitter across  this picture, alight on one of the scrawny apple tree branches, flutter and flit then stand motionless so I could no longer define its form against the brilliant white backdrop.  From where I sit on an old cane whicker chair with red linen covers and random scatter cushions, bright colors and stripes, I can see the remnants of Christmas in the fairy lights, the red and green around the stone fireplace, the cards across the mantle on top.  He squints slightly over the half-frames, reading the sports se...