Yesterday I took Amtrak's Downeaster from Boston to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, hoping to capture words and sounds reflecting my lifelong love of trains. I also hoped I'd find someone to interview.  Enter Peter McHugh. I think you'll enjoy his story.
Flickr photo by Eric Olson (username: broccolbee)
"Going to the Sun" composed and performed by Montana musicians Christine Dickinson, Janet Haarvig and Matthew Lyon. From their Glacier Journey CD

http://www.maho.org/Tomorrow morning I leave for St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to spend two weeks with my wife and her family at Maho Bay Camps.  It's a very rustic setting, and I've decided it's not worth the hassle to try and keep to my weekly podcast schedule while I'm there.  So I'll be back with the podcast in early June.

Merle Goldman, professor emerita at Boston University and an associate at the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Resarch, last night addressed the Mothers' Club of Cambridge Thursday night open meeting, hosted at the Cambridge Historical Society on Brattle Street.  My mother has belonged to this club for decades, and I can see why she seldom misses its events, even in bone-chillingly cold weather like we had in Cambridge last night.  This episode contains a brief interview I did with Prof. Goldman during the reception after her talk, in which she put China's incredible economic growth in historical perspective and posed questions about whether the nation of 1.3 billion can make political changes fast enough to sustain the ongoing economic phenomenon.

Music: "Going to the Sun" on the Glacier Journey CD composed by Montana musicians Christine Dickinson, Janet Haarvig and Matthew Lyon  Link here. Used by permission.

This visit to Cambridge marks the beginning of our remodeling plans for our new home here that will complement our base in Denver.  I've combined two artistic impressions of Cambridge in this podcast, a poem I wrote about the birth of my grandson a year ago, and an anthem sung by the Fellows of the University Choir this morning at Harvard's Appleton Chapel.

Every time I fly the JetBlue red-eye from Denver to Boston, I hope I will sleep.  This week, I armed myself with a geeky audio eyeshade from Brookstone and a horseshoe pillow made of space-age material, and I interviewed several fellow passengers in Denver, asking for their sleep tips.  The result was maybe an hour of sleep, or was it an hour of simply tossing and turning in a row I had all to myself?  In any event, I'm still looking for ideas on how to sleep on planes.  Feel free to add your own  suggestions!

The photo is from JetBlue's Flickr photos, taken on the company's first flight to Tuscon.  The music is “Seven Days of Falling? by Esbjorn Svensson Trio, courtesy of IODA Promonet.

On a visit to Hartford, I thought I was following in the footsteps of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), the renowned poet, on the two-mile walk he took each day from work at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to his home at 118 Westerly Terrace.  In the way of poetry, things didn't turn out the way I planned, and my walk ended up being as disorienting and oddly satisfying as a difficult Stevens poem.

To listen to Stevens reading "The Idea of Order at Key West," click here, courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.

"In an Instant" from the CD Make or Break by Incognito courtesy of IODA Promonet.