Rick Bailey's Blog: Stuff happens, then you write about it, page 6

A review of Drop and Add

Drop and Add by Rick Bailey is a terrific book. An accomplished essayist, Bailey brings to his first novel all the characteristics that make his non-fiction a joy to read: a lively intelligence, the ability to limn characters in a sentence or two, an expert sense of narrative pacing that carries the reader along at…More

Socks Optional

Am I looking at that man’s feet?  Yes, I am looking at that man’s feet. Or more accurately, at his ankles. Is he wearing socks? That’s what I want to know. We’re walking single file (he’s in front of me) out of a shopping center. I notice a distinct flash between the bottom of his…More

from Get Thee to a Bakery

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” my wife says. It’s a sunny Saturday morning, early September.  I’m climbing a ladder leaned up against the house. It’s that time of year. The air has begun to change; it’s both crisp and faintly rotten-smelling. Where we live we are rich in cottonwoods, proving that riches can also…More

Stand Up–from Get Thee to a Bakery

“Why don’t the trees fall down?” I was pulling out of the local elementary school, where I’d just dropped off my daughter, a third-grader. It was 8:35 a.m., a sunny day. Seated in the back seat of the car, my pre-school-bound son was looking out the car windows. At that age, belted into the back…More

Ravioli, Richard the Third, and a Dead Bird (from American English, Italian Chocolate)

It was not what I expected to find. “Last night I dreamed I killed someone.” I was checking a journal I keep to see where we ate those ravioli one year, the ones with the poppy sauce. A friend of mine wakes up every morning and writes down his dreams. An otherwise right-handed person, he…More

Tupperware and the Vitruvian Man–from And Now This

When I learned that Tupperware had fallen on hard times, I remembered it’s place in my early married life– Aside from the parties, which usually featured lots of appetizers and white wine, I’ve always hated Tupperware. I think of this because my wife and I are preparing to go on a little vacation. In a…More

No Hurry

I’m on my way out the door and Tizi says, “Be sure to take your foot off the accelerator when you approach a stoplight.” This strikes me as oddly specific. Why not a more general expression of concern, like drive carefully? Now she adds, “Sometimes you mistake the gas pedal for the brake.”  Do I? …More

A review of Drop and Add

Drop and Add, a tender, ambitious novel set in rural Michigan, both celebrates and interrogates small-town America. We see Freeland through the eyes of Bailey’s protagonist, fresh-faced Eliot Becker, a recent PhD who accepts his first adjunct teaching job at Eastern Technical College. In this stranger-comes-to-town tradition, Bailey excels at showing us how people both change…More

Falling Stars and Pizza

This morning the girl at the next table is having pizza for breakfast. I’m having cappuccino and a pastry, sitting at a bar on the lungomare in Pesaro. I look, then look again. It’s not just a pizza. It’s a pizza Rossini. You know it as soon as you see the mayonnaise and the slices…More

Get Going

This morning I went nowhere slow. Usually I go for a long bike ride, leaving the apartment around 5:30 a.m., riding down the coast on the bike lanes toward Fano. The sun will rise out of the Adriatic. If I’d never seen a sunrise before, I might stop and watch, take its picture. On a…More