Category: March 2010

  • WHERE SHALL WE GO NOW, MY FAMILY AND I?

    As a general proposition, I often warn my readers about the essays that appear on these pages.  And so it is that in this case, I will tell you that the essay that follows is about Irish music and also about my father.  My father could not sing worth a lick.  That applied to Irish…

  • WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SILENCE?

    When I was a youngster, John Gualdoni ran a grocery store in Brentwood, Missouri.  It was located on North and South Road.  The people in the grocery store were the clerks Bob and Louie, the butcher, and John himself.  We had to put up with what Bob and Louie had to wisecrack about as well…

  • PURGATORY POLITICS

    As a general principle, I try to avoid writing about religious matters because my views on that subject are well known.  Simply put, I am a non-believer.  But in the past week or so, I almost became a believer.  There was a development that simply had to be commented upon, which is the subject of…

  • IT AIN’T NATURAL

    My father, who was a taciturn man, didn’t have much to say while he was alive.  He has been a resident of the Oakhill Cemetery in Kirkwood, Missouri for 52 years and, one way or another, in recent essays he has turned up a good bit more than he did when he was alive. In…

  • PLEASE, GIVE ME A VOTE

    I suspect that everyone who has attained the Methuselah-like age of 80 may well have given thought to his or her own departure.  I don’t dwell on that subject but I am quite aware that it exists.  Again, I suspect that the dying part is not the major consideration.  It is the preliminaries of extended…

  • BASTARDS LIKE ME

    I guess that I am finally cornered.  I will have to admit that I am a Democrat and that I subscribe to the liberal wing of that party.  Today that is called the progressive part of the Democratic Party.  But as I progress into my 88th year, and this is being dictated on the Christian…

  • A FEW WORDS ABOUT READING AND LISTENING

    For reasons unknown to me, I have been a voracious reader from the time Miss Brantley rescued me from the girls’ room.  I have told the story before but perhaps it bears repeating.  On my first day in school in the Forsythe School in Clayton, Missouri, I felt the need to relieve myself and walked…