In my first column for this newspaper three years ago, I wrote about one of my historical fascinations.
On Memorial Day, we traditionally honor Americans in our military who gave their lives in battle for our country. It…
As readers of this column may know, I have terminal cancer.
I had contrived to reach 62 years of age without the big event.
Ah, the Golden Rule.
After more than 56 years, I can still smell and taste the rubbery things.
I admire these guys for very different reasons.
I’ve heard people say that human beings are the only creatures that know they will die.
It seems I got to be a geezer awful fast.
Like Teddy Daniels, a former candidate for Pennsylvania lieutenant, who is prominently featured in a series of doomsday, deep-fake ads on Facebook and Youtube.
I could call up any large chain store in a city and talk to someone without being told to call corporate ownership on the other side of the country.
As the poet Theodore Roethke once wrote: “In a dark time the eye begins to see…”
I have not written much in this space about my mother.
“Learn a new language and get a new soul.”
I have said and done many things of which I am not proud. That is, I am no golden bird cheeping about human frailties from some high branch of superhuman understanding.
That’s what happens whenever I hear the opening notes of Bruce Springsteen’s wonderful “My Hometown.”
Of course there’s irony here in that LinkedIn is asking writers — who, after all, make their living by writing — to help “educate” a technology that would automate their jobs.
I have always considered it a strength, not a weakness, to consult with people with whom we vehemently disagree.
I can’t shake the conviction that a sense of perpetual aggrievement is one of the key components of the engine driving our national estrangement.
I was curious. I had to know what was true. So I set out to educate myself.
