Ezra's Essays

Category: Depression

  • WILL THE NEWS EVER GET BETTER?

    These days I get my news via my ears. My wife reads the headlines and stories from The New York Times, as well as from the New Jersey Star Ledger and Newsweek. Then I listen to an audio version of the Times. Today is August 4, which marks a milestone in my lifetime, as it…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • MAYBE BEING POOR AIN’T ALL BAD

    This essay offers the thought that being poor financially, may have its merits. Obviously, its drawbacks are well known. The conventional wisdom these days runs against being poor, but being one step away from financial disaster is in communion with the philosophy of a country woman who claimed Lusk, Illinois as her birth place. Country…

  • MUSINGS – Volume I

    To put it bluntly, the eyesight of this old essayist is not as sharp as it was when soldering was my occupation. So after 67 years of driving cars and trucks and airplanes, my head prevailed over my heart and my retirement from driving cars has now occurred. If there is an emergency, of course,…

  • ELEPHANTS AND MORE CONUNDRUMS

    Today is my birthday. Ordinarily, my birthday happens only once a year, so it has always been my intention to be as charitable as possible on this sanctified occasion. It is very difficult to be charitable this year as we were told last Sunday, August 1st, that the terrorists planned to annihilate those of us…

  • BITS AND PIECES | AUTOMOBILES AND MEN’S SHOES

    During my formative years, it was necessary to work. This was in the Great Depression which lasted from 1929 until war broke out in December, 1941. During that time, the place where one went to buy gas or to have a car lubricated was called a filling station. Later when wordsmiths took a leading role…

  • “…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…

  • EHHH… WHAT’S THAT YOU SAID?

    Here is a little Missouri story that has no effect on the current state of the world. It is memorialized here not because it is a great story; but rather, as time takes its toll on my brain, I may forget all about it. So if I write these thoughts down now, when the television…

  • “I’M EVERYBODY” – VERNON LUDLOFF

    It may very well be that this essay should be entitled “Back to the Future.” In my current situation, I am of course unable to see the action taking place on television. I listen to the dialogue on television and in many cases, I can determine who the speaker may be but in other cases…