Ezra's Essays

Category: 2006

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • ON WOMEN

    The news from South Dakota this week is that the legislature there has passed a bill, and the governor has signed it, which forbids abortions anywhere in the great state of South Dakota. There are no exceptions for rape or for incest. This is simply a return to the days before Roe v. Wade was…

  • “…AND THEY DID NOT BURY THE DEAD”

    If you will lend me your eyes for a few moments, I will try to give you a nickel’s worth about aphasia and several dollars’ worth about the realities of being a soldier. My thoughts about the realities of being a soldier have been rolling around in my mind and have been keeping me awake…

  • DON'T LAUGH AT ME

    Sometimes essays write themselves. That was the case recently in an essay having to do with an exchange of correspondence between Matthew Pepe and myself involving deflectors which he installed to keep me on course as I negotiate the driveway with the garbage containers. Here is another essay that has written itself. This essay is…

  • ON GOLF, CIVIL WAR, AND VIRGINS

    -Three Disparate Thoughts Growing up during the great American Depression, it was my view that golf was an elitist sport. There were a few driving ranges around, but public golf courses were few and far between. Jobs also were few and far between and money was a problem at every step of the way. Golf…