Columbus, OHSeptember 13, 2019 Today, like a New England pond on a crisp fall day, we have a moment to reflect. Most of you, assuming you actually stoop to read this drivel…must wonder why I bother to write it. Let’s consider potential motives. Perhaps as an escape from stale hotel lobbies, noisy airport lounges, or […]
Highlands, NCSeptember 2, 2019 One advantage of spending three months as a shiftless unemployed ne’er-do-well bum is that you eventually don’t know or care what day of the week it is. Things must and do get done, but in general they can be completed on any day you prefer, in whatever order you choose. Similarly, […]
Atlanta, GAAugust 25, 2019 Some days you realize maybe you were better off not getting the first class upgrade, or retroactively relieved that someone else ordered the last filet mignon. I spent yesterday afternoon sitting beside my father-in-law as he received one of his three weekly doses of dialysis. He was asleep for about half […]
Atlanta, GA August 10, 2019 I cannot live without books. – Thomas Jefferson School is back. Last week David started his first year of high school, Alexander his last. The air, if not the calendar, carries a slight semblance of the season associated with a return to campus. Among the more amazing events in a […]
Grand Rapids, MI June 27, 2019 Given the hypothermic water conditions a couple days ago, we decided to wait till yesterday to venture back in the lake. Since the temperature had been in the high 40s and is now in the upper 50s, holding off certainly made sense. Then again, it was a bit like […]
Glenn, MIJuly 25, 2019 Last week’s heat has subsided. Morning coffee and evening wine once again yearn to be consumed under the comfort of sweaters or the cover of blankets. Like a liberating force expelling a foreign army, howling winds and torrential rain made an amphibious landing over the weekend, chased the occupying heat from […]
Glenn, MIJuly 21, 2019 When sorrows come They come not as single spiesBut as battalions– Hamlet When it rains, it pours -Same idea, with less pomposity Slave-driven triremes carried the material goods and mental heritage of Greece and Rome through the shoals and storms of the Mediterranean and, over the tide of time, to us. Columbus […]
Glenn, MIJune 29, 2019 Tiberius escaped to Capri. Jefferson to Poplar Forest. Hearst to his Castle. Thoreau to his pond. For seventeen years, we have come here. Our uncle George bought this house, on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, twenty-five years ago. Several years later, he invited Rita and me to bring our 18-month-old first-born […]
Atlanta, GA June 19, 2019 Many of you…like craven empty-nesters who forgot to buy candy on Halloween night…locked the doors, turned off the lights, and cowered under the kitchen table. When my employer relieved me of my job like a beached whale pushed back into to the sea, you no doubt shuddered in dreary expectation […]
Atlanta, GA May 22, 2019 Today marks a major milestone. The number twelve and its duodecuple system have a distinguished and durable history as a chronicler of human affairs and measure of human activity. Even the prosaic rationality of the metric system, gestating during the 17th and 18th centuries, born of La Marseillaise and Marianne in 1799, and extending […]