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BUONO NATALE
Last week when I received a very favorable report as a result of my visit to a physician, I suggested to my wife that we should have lunch at an Italian restaurant here in Millburn called Basilico. Basilico is the Italian word for the herb basil. From that, the events on that day led to…
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SKID CHAINS
Just north of the home where I was raised was a road that ran from St. Louis to Clayton, Missouri. It is naturally called Clayton Road. West of our house was a road that ran north and south; it ran from Clayton, Missouri to Brentwood, Missouri and it was called North and South Road. As…
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“AIN’T A DAMN THING YOU CAN DO”
I have lived in this town for a little more than 40 years. The last 11 years have been taken up with essay writing. When I stroll down Main Street, no one nudges anyone else and says, “There goes the philosopher.” For better or worse, philosophy has not been one of the main subjects of…
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FRIDAY’S FISH
Most of you over the years have come to know how I feel about religion. There is one aspect from long ago that you may not know. As is widely known, in smaller and smaller circles, it was my fate to grow up in the suburbs of St. Louis. This would have been in the…
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LEFTY
The people who take opinion polls will tell you that the quality of their findings is a function of the questions that are asked. If you ask the wrong question, you will get a misleading answer. This essay has to do with asking the right questions. In this general vicinity of suburban New York towns,…
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FLIES
This essay has to do with how men’s clothing is tailored. It does not have to do with the insects that buzz around our heads in the summer time nor does it have to do with fly balls as in the case of baseball. Primarily it has to do with the opening in the front…
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TRANSIENT THOUGHTS
These are transient thoughts; there is no continuity between one thought and the other. Now one of these transient thoughts has to do with baseball. For many years, Sunday afternoon professional baseball was banned. So you can imagine the thoughts that would go through a believer’s mind as he encountered a team nicknamed the Angels.…
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THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS
My eighth-grade teacher was a plump woman who would have been greatly pleased if someone had mistakenly identified her as an English poet. She wore shoes that went out of style after the First World War and she loved to read from her book of poems by English poets. Beyond that, Miss Maxwell loved the…
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AFGHANISTAN
There are devices on the market that will turn the written word into the spoken word. Because I have lost the ability to read, I have one of those devices. On Sundays Miss Chicka makes it a point for me to read the op ed pieces in The New York Times and The Washington Post.…