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WHERE SHALL WE GO NOW, MY FAMILY AND I?
As a general proposition, I often warn my readers about the essays that appear on these pages. And so it is that in this case, I will tell you that the essay that follows is about Irish music and also about my father. My father could not sing worth a lick. That applied to Irish…
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MUSIC AND MEMORY
Those of you who have followed Ezra’s Essays know that during my childhood I was forced to attend religious services of the Protestant faith. There were the Southern Baptists, the Nazarenes, the Pentecostals, and, finally, the Free Will Baptists. In the last case, the Free Willers banned musical accompaniment to their hymn singing on the…
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RAMPANT NOSTALGIA
This may be a twice-told tale in that in 2005 I may have dictated an essay on the same subject matter. But I have always held that the fun in story-telling belongs to the story teller. It is a lot like prayer. The person who prays feels good about himself when his prayer is finished. …
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STUPIDO, STUPIDO, STUPIDO
Last week, which would have been the early part of June 2010, there was an announcement by two high-level vice presidents of the General Motors Corporation, that they were going to get rid of the “Chevy” trademark. As most Americans would do, I interpreted that to mean that General Motors was going to rid itself…
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RED (OR BLUE) BANDANNAS
Those of you who were raised in the precincts of America’s great cities may well have missed out on an article of men’s wear that is usually associated with hard work and/or country ways. Again, if I may use my father as an example, I would like to cite one article of his clothing that…
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LAMENTATIONS ON “I WISH”
I keep two identical dictating machines on my desk. The left one is for dictations that I turn over to Mrs. Eva Baker for transcription. The right one is for notes about future essays. Recently I recorded some notes on the subject of lamentations which was a subject I wanted to do an essay on. …
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IT’S ALL BECAUSE OF JESUS
In the fall of 1997, Shirley Morganstein was the Director of Speech Therapy at the Kessler Rehabilitation Institute in West Orange, New Jersey. In November of that year, I had a stroke that had spared my limbs but had left me with a galloping case of aphasia, which is why I consulted Shirley Morganstein. Thirteen…
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PEPSI COLA HITS THE SPOT
The cast of characters in this essay is humungous. I have no idea what humungous means, but youngsters use that term and it is a lot better than some of their other expressions. Now on to the characters. First there were my playmates, Billy Seyfried, Timoteo Marcellan, and Charlie Baldridge. Beyond those playmates, there is…
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GOING INTO DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME
This essay should have been written a number of years ago. It records my resentment and anger at the imposition of daylight savings time. I hope that there are others who are as dismayed as I am about the imposition of daylight savings time. In my limited field of acquaintances, no one has expressed an…
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LAYAWAY PLANS
One of my faithful readers has been Thelma DuPont. Thelma and I worked in the overseas department of the AT&T Company before both of us retired, which seems like in the last century. Thelma and I grew up nearly 1,000 miles apart yet, judging from her letters to me, we had similar experiences. For example,…