Category: Friends

  • THREE GOOD GUYS

    This is a short story about three good guys – Dick Lewin, Emory Wilbur and John Rosenburg. The villain is Henry Killingsworth, the man who ran AT&T Long Lines Department for many years. In supporting roles are my sister Verna, an aspiring opera singer. In other incidental roles we have Gannaro Papi, the conductor of…

  • FOUR STARS OF DAVID

    BUSH & SHARON – THE HAMHANDED EFFORT TO GET THINGS RIGHT Jerusalem has been on my mind of late because of the bombings and other acts of warfare that have taken place there. At the outset, I must point out that I am not an active partisan in the dispute between the Israeli and Palestine…

  • “OLD AGE IS A DISEASE”

    -FRAU DOKTOR HERTA KNOPFMACHER FISCHER   I know a man who speaks lovingly, respectfully, and admiringly about his own mother-in-law. Can you imagine that? His mother-in-law furnished the title for this essay. This woman was born in 1878 in the Sudetenland. There is considerable mystery about whether in 1878 the Sudetenland belonged to the German…

  • UPON BEING A GRANDFATHER

    Beady-eyed accountants may emerge from their grimy offices from time to time and lift their green eye-shades to contend that the Chicka-Carr combine has only five grandchildren. To that contention, I say “Bal-der-dash” and “Bah Humbug,” which are terms used with great effectiveness by John Major, the British prime minister who tucked his undershirt and…

  • COUNTRY SPEAK | MISSING WORDS

    In a previous essay, I commented on missing people. In this case, I will try to comment on a very few missing words from our vocabularies these days. This exercise is called “Country Speak.” I call this essay “Country Speak” because the words that are missing from urban areas are found most often in the…

  • RITA, MAY I INTRODUCE YOU TO ROLLAND?

    …And Both of You Ought to Get to Know Frances Day A few essays back, I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes and dictated an essay about the most bitter woman I ever knew in my life. That woman was my boss’s secretary. You may recall that she is the one who told me,…

  • REFLECTIONS ON A LONG WORKING CAREER

    One Sunday morning recently, there was a series of reports about mosque bombings in Iraq. One sect would try to bomb out the other sect. John Warner, the senior senator from Virginia and the head of the Armed Forces Committee in the Senate, got things terribly confused. Warner, who is a mature man, confused sectarian…

  • ANNETTE, MILDRED, OPAL AND ESSIE | A Retrospective on Women

    This is an essay about the unfairness’s that life seems to have reserved for women. In nine years of writing essays, this is the fourth essay on these meaningful inequities. As I set out to write this essay, lines from two songs come to mind. The first is from a traditional folk song called “The…

  • A REPRISE ON DIGNITY AND TEARS

    Those of us who write essays recognize that when an essay demands to be written, it will be done. You may remember a recent essay called, “A Matter of Dignity.” In that essay, it recounted the story about how Matthew Pepe, my old friend who installs driveways and sidewalks, saw the problem of my taking…

  • A MATTER OF DIGNITY

    Those of us who have lost our sight frequently wrestle with the thought of our potential uselessness. It has always been so. In the Irish folksong, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” an Irish soldier who served with the British Army returns from a battle in Ceylon minus two limbs. The song’s lyrics say, “You haven’t…