Ah, Jake and Elwood, so nice to see you again! I happened upon The Blues Brothers Movie last night. A few years have passed since my last viewing of the iconic film. Jake and Elwood are ex-cons. Jake is picked up by his brother Elwood outside of Joliete prison. They visit the Catholic orphanage…
Retrieved my copy of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Colony. I periodically review it with fresh interest, as the years pass. Accrued life experience allows a richer and deeper interpretation of Bradford’s words. Yes, these were Englishmen, my ancestors by blood and by religious heritage. Their tale is similar to immigrant tales of our…
No, wait! For this story a title with more zip, more punch is needed. Here are some choices. I’ll let you the reader look these over and make a selection, after you have read the New York Times article. Y’all come on down! Winter comes early to Republican red-state-Texas Making promises you can’t keep…
How would I know Custer’s words? The battle between the US 7th Cavalry and the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes took place 140 years ago. I was born 140 years late to hear what if anything he might have said, had I been there. Additionally only Indians walked away from that fight alive. …
Nicolaus Copernicus surmised that the earth rotated around in sun in about 1514, and no one killed him for thinking that. He lived another twenty-nine years and died at the age of seventy. Throughout those final twenty-nine years, his revolutionary description of outer space mostly seemed an unprovable thought experiment that had the ancillary…
Twenty four hours ago I was horribly ill. Four or five sessions of throwing up, and then came the fever. At some point the thought occurred to me, –so this is how we die. I did not dwell on the thought. The coming of dawn always makes everything better. I had several emails and…
Some years ago I spent a few days by the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state. In the course of the hiking expeditions, two things came to mind over and over. The immense beauty of the surroundings was indescribable. The physical sensation of hazard, of the lethal consequences of a lapse in judgment, was…
One Tin Soldier is a 1960’s era protest song written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter. It was first recorded by the Canadian group The Original Castle in 1969. It was recorded in 1971 by The American group Coven and it reached number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was featured in the…
I am a North Carolinian, who immigrated to Chicago and adapted to life in one of the world’s great cities. Yet, the South has a place in my heart. Every visit to Louisville, Kentucky feels like home coming. Louisville is located on the Ohio River, a trade route since the West was settled in…
The road from Chicago to Louisville can seem longer than the five and a half hour drive the journey is supposed to take. Especially if you happen to run into a time-killing-slow-crawl traffic jam in the Chicago metro area. We’d been on the road for a while and were just past Indianapolis. Our joints…
