COLD MOON

Memories and musings from the winter solstice of a life.

"Better to know where to go than how to get there,” writes the veteran essayist and author of fiction and nonfiction. “I wander from thought to thought, having learned but three things from my long night's moon. I believe in life. I believe in love. I believe we are responsible for each other.” At 80, the author is in the "cold moon" of his life, the last full moon of the year. In brief passages connected by association and with the improvisational feel of jazz, he moves fluidly among memoir, philosophy, natural history, and inspiration, riffing on everything from the migration of the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle to the landscape photographs of Oleg Ershov and the plot of a movie he saw in 1946 called Stairway to Heaven. It played for one week in the only movie theater in Westport, Connecticut, and when his mother took 5-year-old Roger to see it on Monday, he asked her to take him again every day after that. After each viewing, they would walk next door for a soda, and his mother would ask him if the movie had been as good as the day before. Better, he would say. Though much of the book is a meditation on aging, it is illuminated by childhood memories like this, one more charming and emblematic than the next. In another passage, the author recounts walking into a stranger's house and sitting down to play their gorgeous Steinway, which had “the gleam of a black stallion.” When the neighbor escorted her 6-year-old visitor home, she commented to his mother on his fearlessness. "It's the way he is," his mother replied. "He thinks the world is waiting for him to walk in and play the piano." Nearly 75 years later, he hasn't changed a bit.

A tonic for tough times filled with plainspoken lyricism, gratitude, and good humor.