Concerning America, the Wild West and Cowboys Recently, my column was about Gene Autry and how this singing cowboy was my boyhood hero. Sharing this long-ago memory was great fun.
In truth, America’s frontier past was mostly a Hollywood creati...
Cobalt: Its beauty is only part of its story Supposing you were in a strange city. Suddenly, walking straight towards you is an old friend you thought you had lost track of. Coincidences happen.
Later in the day, another long-lost friend. ...
Days Are Good, Bad, Blah or Glass I started to write about glass. But what matters about glass is how it makes me feel, and has for as long as I can remember. So I’m writing about “glass” feelings.
It began when I was a little kid...
Remembering Gene Autry, a remarkable American Figure A memory came back to life as I listened to a recording of a boyhood hero. I had found a song recorded by Gene Autry, called “20/20 Vision, and Walking Around Blind.”
Autry’s voice was unmistakabl...
About numerals, dust boards, scrolls and fingermath By the phone on a yellow sticky note was a phone number in my own handwriting. The shape of my numbers brought back when my third grade teacher and I got crosswise over the “correct” way to write A...
Failure is often a door to insight One of the oldest cliches is “Actions have consequences,” but we should take the time to do more than acknowledge that and move on.
Every venture ends in success or failure, and the larger the vent...
Two Pairs, Fred and Ginger, Frank and Ernest My morning has turned into pairs, two of which I hope you will find interesting.
My mornings start with puzzles the newspaper brings me, a pair of mental gymnastics I refuse to recognize as an addi...
What did Shakespeare really write? Since you are reading this, it is clear that the world did not end last week. That’s good. Now there is one thing less to worry about.
If we got involved in every dire warning, there wouldn’t be ti...
Dialectics: An Old Way to Reach Agreement Somewhere there are people who want to kill us. What have we done to deserve this threat? Nothing, really. It could be no more than questioning something they were taught to believe.
In response, o...
Watching humans act like humans is great entertainment Sometimes I take myself too seriously. Then I get over it, and the world becomes wonderful entertainment, warts and all. That was, by the way, a conscious choice, helped by succinct advice last eve...
I find myself scared by an alphabet soup, and you might be too In the spring of 1945, everyone but Hitler knew the war was almost over. Both Russians and Americans offered new homes to German scientists. We called our offer Operation Paperclip.
Many went into...
What kind of writing should our schools be teaching? History is important to show us where we have been, so we can tell where we are going. Most of our correct decisions are made by applying the lessons of history, but history began as storytelling....
