by Katharine Ogden Michaels | May 3, 2022 | Uncategorized
My first personal encounter with Barclay was at the Barclay Simpson Fine Arts Gallery in Lafayette, California sometime in mid 1981. Before that day, I had only seen him from a distance at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | Apr 26, 2022 | Uncategorized
I had first selected Rome as a strategic retreat out of a vague conviction that its classical facades and mysterious streets, alluring to me since childhood through books and stories, would fill the hole dug inside of me by failed love. And, indeed, the actual...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | Apr 20, 2022 | Uncategorized
On December 2nd of that year, I was waiting for Leonard Michaels, noted fiction writer, to emerge from the baggage claim area of the Rome, Italy airport. He had just landed from San Francisco. I saw him from afar before he saw me. I didn’t leap up to reassure him, but...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | Apr 1, 2022 | Uncategorized
To understand Barclay (Barc) Simpson—founder and prime mover of the Simpson Manufacturing Company– one must first understand his core product. Stripped down to its essence, the Simpson Strong-Tie (also known as a connector) is a piece of bent metal joinery that...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | Mar 23, 2022 | Uncategorized
The complexities of language were from the beginning integral to my connection to Italy. Initially, the consolations were fundamentally aural, directly linked to the compelling companionship of a linguistically skilled consort who made the study of the new language a...
by Katharine Ogden Michaels | Mar 22, 2022 | Uncategorized
Several years ago I went to Italy to get away from a bad love affair. How bad could a year in Rome be? I hoped that three years of high school Latin and five years of French grammar and literature would help me with Italian–which they did. Tellingly,...
