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FORBIDDEN WORDS
As an essayist, I welcome all words that will fit appropriately in my essays. There are several million people who write better essays than I do, including Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is in love with the words he writes and the longer and more obscure terms suit him greatly. My essays are less esoteric and deal…
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POLK SALAD (SALET)
This essay has to do with a vegetable or a weed that appears in the springtime and is uncultivated. It grows along hedge rows and along the highways and when it reaches maturity, it is quite poisonous. Also this essay is an exercise in nostalgia. It has to do with my mother, who departed this…
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RANDOM THOUGHTS: BOTH BAD AND GOOD
In these days of the winter, I find that my mind produces some random thoughts. They don’t go together. Rather they are individual thoughts that strike me from time to time. As the title of this essay suggests, there are some bad thoughts, and quite separately, there are good thoughts. One of the least praiseworthy…
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SICK CALL
Anyone who wishes to extol the virtues of medicine as practiced by the United States Army is clearly out of his mind. This encompasses active military service as well as the Veterans Administration. My experience of a little bit more than three years in the American Army would seem to suggest very vociferously that anyone…
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CHRISTMAS PONDERINGS
This is being dictated on Christmas of the year 2012. It is near noontime and the house where we have lived for a long time is quiet now. The children who carry the Carr surname and their husbands and children are involved in festivities in Florida and in Texas. So in these peaceful surroundings I…
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A LECTURE ON THE ART/SCIENCE OF FALLING
It is my hope that all of you grammarians who read these essays will be aware of the fact that I really said “falling” not “falling down.” I have observed over this long life that things do not fall up. The fact is that they fall in a downward fashion. And so this lecture will…
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THE MUTE BUTTON
When I was born in 1922, there was one radio station offering broadcasts of music and news. That was station KDKA in Pittsburgh. You may recall that at that time there was no such thing as television. That remained in the never-never land of things to be yearned for. When I was about 12 or…
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THE LINGUA AMERICANA
I have always been moved by additions to this language we speak. It is not a static language. Rather it involves all kinds of new additions. As Sven Lernevall my friend of many years says of the English language, it is “a rich language.” And so this small essay is intended to recognize the richness…
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SAVERS OF STRING
I have given this essay the title which may recall some distant memories of the Bible by calling it “Savers of String” instead of “String Savers”. Now having settled that question, I would like to dedicate it to Thelma Dupont. This essay is so dedicated to Thelma because she comes from a family larger than…
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BODY AND SOUL
This is a philosophical essayette on the condition of mankind. A learned gentleman once remarked within my hearing that he would prefer to remain in control over his intellect in the final days before his body gave out. This assumes that the human condition is comprised of body and intellect. The learned gentleman to whom…