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Letter to Kevin 6/15/05
Kevin – Judy and I were delighted with your response to the letter and the essay about Mencken. I am not surprised by your mother withholding it from you. She may well have referred my letter to the FBI or to the Texas Holy Roller Diocese before she let you read it. Basically, from the…
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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…
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A LETTER TO A FRIEND CONCERNING LIFE AFTER BLINDNESS
Word has reached these ears that you have expressed the view that life would not be worth living if blindness ever occurred to you. This letter is not meant to chastise or to criticize that point of view, because the author has had many of those same thoughts in recent years. I fully understand the…
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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…
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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…
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THANKSGIVING, 2006
In my longer than expected life, I have never looked forward to the year end celebrations. The long American Depression kept Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations from being joyous occasions. In our family, at best, they were subdued. In effect, I enjoyed the holidays knowing that they would soon be behind me. When Thanksgiving arrived this…
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EHRHARDT’S DAUGHTER
For several days now, I have been thinking about one of my classmates at the Clayton, Missouri public school system. She was the only daughter of the couple who presided over the small restaurant immediately west of the Clayton High School. She dressed plainly, wore no makeup that could be discerned and had little to…
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BLOODY NOOSE-I-NANCE
EEC dictation 11-17-05 1st DRAFT The subject of this essay today is blindness. No circumlocutions, no euphemisms, just plain blindness. The blindness, of course, has to do with your old essay writer. As time went on during the recent series of eye operations, it became apparent that aphasia began to make giant strides toward erasing…
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OH, GOOD JESUS
As a general rule, Gentiles who profess a religious faith tend to claim that they are Christians of one sort or another. While Christianity requests that it adherents subscribe to various rules, a good many rules are ignored or are deliberately violated. A case in point is the Catholic teaching that use of birth control…