One day shy of a  fourth opportunity to have a bit more fun with Michael’s mysterious invisibility, foiled.    He is back, so we do not need to make reference to other young men of letters who stopped writing and made us all wish otherwise.  And thankfully there was no resemblance to the story of Yuri Andropov after all, either.  Nor to the even less humorous, or more humorless, current event question that Amy Davidson asks in her most recent blog post.

Let’s change the subject.  Earthquake. No humor in that either.  But for a rare short-form piece by John McPhee, take a look here, to help put such events in perspective.  Amie, Milo and Adrien were all in the location McPhee describes, at the time when that piece first appeared.  The folks who manage that ever-improving site where it was first posted perform a great service of recycling archival material when news brings an old piece to new relevance.  Yesterday’s mention of Pete Seeger makes this worthy of recycling. It is, itself, a recycling of personal history along with a moving observation of the good guy’s aura:

His voice is a little shaky now (he talks the songs as much as sings them), his banjo picking is a little uncertain, and he required the help of his grandson, a powerful singer and guitarist with a perfect sixties name: Tao Rodríguez-Seeger. But he gave a lovely performance, and when he reappeared at the end, to sing “Down by the Riverside (Ain’t Gonna Study War No More)” with Ani and her band, there was nothing but love in that room.