All Purls. No Swine.
From a few years ago, with only gentle editing, and from my home to yours. May your 2026 be one of the happiest years ever! (I have high hopes for mine.) Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering 'it will be happier'--Alfred, Lord Tennyson Crimenutely. In my search for a suitable… Continue reading Two from Tennyson for New Year’s Eve 2025
Axios has obtained and released lengthy excerpts from the audio recordings of Joe Biden’s October 2023 testimony before Special Counsel Robert Hur. Here’s just one: https://youtu.be/ugM76taxz2E And there, you have it. A focused, direct, 20-second's worth of question followed by over four minutes of painful, incoherent, and irrelevant rambling. Eventually, as Biden winds down to his… Continue reading A Walk Down Memory Lane: And the “Empathy” Myth
Every year, for almost more years than I can count whether we're together or apart, my family has raised a glass each Christmas season to those we love but won’t see again in this world, and to those we love who are still with us, but who are not able to share our celebration, because… Continue reading …To Absent Friends and Loved Ones, 2024…
Whoops. I missed it. Yesterday, November 29, 2024 was the 126th birthday of one of my favorite writers in all of recorded history, Clive Staples (Jack) Lewis. I've written about him often, even when it wasn't his birthday, but today I'm going to do a bit of a rehash of a post from a few… Continue reading Quote of the Day: “To Love is to be Vulnerable”
Forty-one years ago, suicide bombers detonated two truck bombs in Beirut, Lebanon. At the end of the day, October 23, 1983, 241 US military personnel, 58 French military personnel, and half-a-dozen civilians were dead. So--praise be--were the two attackers. I was twenty-nine years old. I remember it clearly. It was an event which set in… Continue reading Quote of the Day: “They Came in Peace,” October 23, 1983
I can't tell you how much I feel this. I really tried. I read all of them: The Mayor of Casterbridge Far From the Madding Crowd Tess of the d'Urbervilles Jude the Obscure Et Cetera But, when it came down to it, electronically, virtually, or boookishly, I just couldn't. And yet. Here's Hardy the poet… Continue reading Oh, Thomas Hardy. Such a dreadful novelist. Such a sublime poet
It will be six years ago next Thursday since my stepson Sam died, and I wrote the post below. Today, July 20, 2024, would have been Sam's fifty-ninth birthday: "His family calls him Sam.” It was the afternoon of Monday, December 11, 2017. The phone was ringing, from a number in Pittsburgh that seemed vaguely… Continue reading Happy Birthday, Our Sam
Cannot believe it's here already. Where has January gone? And February almost half-over! (That it isn't quite, in about 23 hours--in my time zone--can only be attributed to the fact that this is a leap year.) Ubi sunt? (The Latinistas among us (the one or two that I know of) will understand this.) It's a… Continue reading Pancake Tuesday, 2024
Fifty-eight years ago today, on January 15, 1966, two of my family’s dearest friends were murdered. Alhaji Sir Ahmadu Bello (pictured right) was the Premier of Northern Nigeria and Sardauna of Sokoto. Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (ATB) was the first (and so far only) Prime Minister of a Nigeria that had achieved its independence from Britain on October 1,… Continue reading These Were My Father’s Muslims
...is to tell their stories. That's what I've tried to do, over the years with my family members, my friends, and many others I've lost over the years. Some of them certainly didn't start out as natural allies. But they all ended up beloved. And the only way I can insure that the world remembers… Continue reading The Best Way to Memorialize the Dead…