My glass, in effect, is half full of sunshine and half full of rain. Trying to keep it real here.

Generally speaking, I'm responsible, social, sometimes funny, ruthless on a tennis court, rueful on a golf course, a rhino in the kitchen. The years, alas, are catching up, but I still get on the mountain bike a few times a week. (I live, luckily, near a trout stream, where it's pretty flat going for a few miles.)

I play the autoharp, sketch, read often, bake bread infrequently and wet a line once in a while -- fly-fish, that is. I also dabble in poetry and write for a living.

Art, music, friends, family, all very important to me. Ice skating, cross-country skiing, swimming, walks in the woods, all very important, too. I'm a runaway city kid, who's spent a lot more time in the country than I have on concrete. -- and no regrets there. I work as a freelance writer, published in several national magazines, a bunch of cover stories to my credit, now working as a finance journalist with a regular gig (nothing wrong with that, far as I know).

The sketch is a self-portrait; the photos are historic, but the one with the kids plural is from last summer.

I'm looking for a bright, independent, loving, typo-tolerant woman who can't wait to see what tomorrow brings, but isn't caught up in catching up with the rest of the world.

Suffice it to say, please have a photo. This is dating Web site, n'est ce pas?

Happiness to me: my kids, a trout stream, a view you earned with your own two feet, friends and family, a warm beach, baseball in October, travel, the Beatles, gardening, Duke Ellington, and time in a hammock of suspended isolation with someone I love.

Occasionally, I put one of my poems on here. This one was written for one of my sons:



As if a pond were talking back


As if a pond were talking back
and bass were roving just below
my prayer is just to know you well.

This idle drift my time portends,
a sojourn on a far shore rim,
hangs upside down, reflective

in a patient cloud. One of us
has been around. And, while I wait
for stone to yield, you--

who are older than today--
have yet to see a moment still.
You test the water even with your lips

in the casting of a blackbird's gaze.
This leaves us sun and earth and rain
and other gifts I cannot claim.

It is fleeting, our time.
Since the moment you were born
nothing, for you, was ever the same.

Still, without prejudice of wind,
you will remember more silence than this,
stealing from me my very breath
and whatever you can take away.




Happy fishing, everybody.

In my neck of the woods, I would neck in the woods. Wait. More realistic: seek out civilization and do what the Romans do: dinner, coffee, chat, laugh, go for a walk, and chat some more.