Category Archives: Geoff Wood Blog

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?             Somebody gave me Richard Ben Cramer’s recent biography of the 1930’s to 1950’s Yankee outfielder Joe DiMaggio – packed with more information than you would want to know.  In fact, I’m not sure … Continue reading →

Mathematical Religion or straining a gnat to swallow a camel.             Beware of mathematics.  It’s not that it is evil.  I mean we are dependent on numbers, equations, percentages, ratios, statistics and such for the clarity we need to build … Continue reading →

“Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?”             There is a violence in today’s Gospel parable (from St. Matthew) that may shock us.  It’s about the king’s matching the violent treatment of his couriers by the … Continue reading →

Odd day-um kwee lay-ti-fee-cot you-ven-too-tem may-ahm.             When – as a ten year old – I was training to become an altar boy, those sounds were the phonetic translation of the Latin response altar boys had to make to the … Continue reading →

The View from Mt. Zion              Recently my wife Jane underwent surgery to remove a very large ovarian tumor at the UCSF cancer center (still known as Mt. Zion Hospital) at Divisadero and Sutter Streets in San Francisco.  Not knowing … Continue reading →

The Golden Age           I have written before about the children Edward, Selina, Harold, Charlotte and their narrator brother – who fill the stories in Kenneth Grahame’s 1895 The Golden Age.  In his Prologue the narrator describes them as very … Continue reading →

  There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / . . . To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / . . .  It is not now as it hath been of yore;             George Bowling … Continue reading →

“Lord, . . . bid me come to you upon the waters.”             In Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady Isabel Archer, an American girl of the 1880’s, was fortunate to have a wealthy aunt to take her under … Continue reading →

Temples of the Holy Ghost             The child was in for a long weekend.  Two older cousins had come to stay on a brief leave from their convent school.  They arrived in their brown convent uniforms but were no sooner … Continue reading →

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft / against the inside knee was leveled firmly . . . /  By God, the old man could handle a spade.  (From the poem by Seamus Heaney: Digging)             I have … Continue reading →