By Brian R Sorrell
, smooths the bitter of unadulterated root beer extract. I know this because I tried and I tried because root beer without the sweet is liniment. And nobody drinks liniment. Sophia is twelve and she is American and she lives in Auckland with her parents who are our friends from California (though they grew up… Read more
the Sefton Pub, no sense that anything was out of reach. We had traveled all day. We made a loop around the Canterbury region on part of Inland Scenic Route 72, starting at our rented bach (pronounced “batch” meaning a holiday (meaning “vacation”) house) just outside downtown Christchurch, just outside the zone leveled by an… Read more
. It’s about noodles. I never made my own pasta until I was forty one years old, and that first time was yesterday. As a kid I worked as a cook in a Sicilian delicatessen and I can’t help but wonder what took so long to get around to this. After the deli owner trained… Read more
with one egg, one cup of “00” flour, a splash of extra virgin olive oil, and a dash of salt. I can’t say I’ve ever been one to measure, and though that habit doesn’t pan out in such pursuits as carpentry and cobbling, with respect to pasta it seems to work. Recipes are ideas, and… Read more
fire was in Sefton, half hour north of Christchurch. If you go by car that is and stick to the main roads. There are plenty other ways to go, you find. Just happened to pick this one. Burning the stubble they call it. The leftovers. The chaff that didn’t make it into reapers or bales… Read more
, the meaning of things, the things I write. I put ideas into words, but the words aren’t mine alone; they’re all ours, and I’ve no claim to ownership over something so sublime as their meaning once they’re out in the world. Lately I’ve been thinking about the scenes I write — and I don’t mean… Read more
climb up here with me,” so I did. The tree is a centuries-old pohutukawa at Te Toki Road Reserve on Waiheke Island, New Zealand. We’ve come here to visit friends who live down the way, and their Vizsla needs his evening run. So does Charlie. It’s nearly dinner time and the cicadas are clacking so… Read more
chirps, and those buggers hiss in a sibilant chorus this time of year. I wonder whether the Chinese fellas on the next bench over suffer this same tongue thwacking misarticulation. I wonder whether they, like me, unwittingly lisp in some similar manner under these conditions. Relatedly, I’ve wondered whether a murmuring crowd affects its members’ dominant accent. The… Read more
of pennies who smelled strongly of Canada Mints and old clothes. For the entire time I knew him, which was fifteen years, he lived in a little green house with his youngest son, Uncle Bill, half way down Grove Road, which ended in a cul-de-sac, which could have run straight through to Watrous Park had… Read more
is a fact I both realise and appreciate. I attribute this gift to being in the middle period of my life. A couple months ago I built a wall of bookshelves. During the project I cut myself once, strained a shoulder muscle into a debilitating spasm, but I never fell off the ladder. I might… Read more