Last month I vacationed for 14 glorious days in the Bahamas, dividing my time between the islands of Exuma and Eleuthera. During my week on Exuma, the Bahamians voted in national elections, held every five years. Their fervor was inspiring. Nearly every car was festooned with flags of one of the four main parties. Many […]
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Many people fret about Mitt Romney’s treatment of his dog nearly thirty years ago than about his weather-vane political convictions. I ignored the story until recently. Sure the facts troubled me. Inhumane is a mild way of describing the 12-hour vacation trip that Seamus endured in a crate atop the family station wagon. But I have bigger […]
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Walking among the graves of strangers on a sunny spring afternoon made me neither sad nor worried about mortality. It did have another effect: the sparse information on tombstones left me imagining the lives of people from other times and other places. They came to life again, however briefly, as I pictured the families they […]
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When my late father retired, he began an emotional quest: to learn as much as he could about the father he never knew. His father walked out never to return when Dad wasn’t yet a month old. The year was 1928. My grandmother, twenty-one at the time, was a newspaper reporter as was the husband […]
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If only I could take back the mouse clicks. The ones that showed how much had changed in the once out-of-way neighborhood in Nashua, New Hampshire, home of my early childhood. I haven’t been back since moving to Florida in 1959. It was spring. I was in the third grade. Then this week while researching […]
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What’s in a last name? Nothing really if you think of it as a mere collection of letters. Just the opposite though if you consider the effect of hearing it aloud. Upon hearing my name an image comes to mind: an anchor thrown from a fast-drifting boat snagging the bottom. It claims and holds my […]
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It’s funny what you remember decades after a memorable news event. Consider the intense controversy over John Lennon’s claim in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. Futility Closet sent me back to that time with one its “miscellany of compendius amusements.” Christian groups from Southern Baptists to the Vatican went nuts, […]
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When will a reporter, especially one for the mainstream media, write: “He lied. Here’s the truth.”? I long for the day and never more than this week. For two consecutive days, NPR reported on the fallout about Rush Limbaugh’s comments about the Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke. In both instances reporter David Folkenflik described what […]
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I want to teach sex education in Utah’s public schools. If the governor signs the Legislature’s recently passed bill as expected, the state will limit the curriculum to abstinence. No teaching about human sexuality, contraception, and homosexuality allowed. I’ve already written my lesson plan. It would be the same every day. Learn four words: “Just […]
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skuEiYfnSFg&feature=related[/youtube] Can a song “exist in a world of its own – not just timeless but ultimately outside of modern music”? One of the rare songs that does, the BBC says, is “Wichita Lineman.” I heard the song today for the first time in years and surely felt the same way I did when Glen […]
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I’m an unadulterated college football fan. My love for the game has remained steadfast even as my interest in sports in general has sharply waned. For decades I attended Florida State games, as did my brothers and father. We often suffered through intolerable heat and humidity, a family bond of sweat and devotion. Many times […]
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When we were kids, my brothers and I spit a lot. Our spitting styles varied in volume, range, and sound but had the same goal: create tough-guy facades. In those days of grappling with budding masculinity, I could not have foreseen that the spit I sent flying so often would mean so much now. Saliva […]
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Thankfully no one can see our dreams. In these impenetrable realms we have no choice but to watch bizarre and disjointed narratives starring ourselves in roles not of our choosing. Like everyone I suppose, I want to attach meaning to my dreams. But aren’t they random shards of memory reassembled into stories that never were […]
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