AT LARGE
Spring Offers Hope – Even for Those with the Black Thumb of Death
Ahh, spring. Every time I utter the word my body instinctively takes a profoundly deep breath. You know the kind I mean, the type of breath doctors instruct you to take while sitting on their exam table waiting for your annual physical. “Now inhale deeply,” my doc will say while placing an ice-cold stethoscope on my chest and back, checking that my lungs and heart [...]
The Museum Effect
‘Tis the season. Winter is now a fading memory. With warmer temperatures, windows and doors open, and the brackishness of closed houses drifting away, it’s time to offer up our trinkets and treasures to the annual tradition of yard sales. Based on the geographic origin of our childhoods, our designation for this rite of spring can be quite different. Call them yard sales, rummage sales, [...]
If Wishes Were Horses
If it had happened once, it likely would have simply been an anomaly – an odd moment in the universe when reasoning got temporarily suspended. It was, however, the third time in less than two weeks that a similar moment had presented itself. “That’ll be six dollars.” The total of two “senior citizen” admissions to the local high school basketball game would be six [...]
BETTER ANGELS. BROKEN WINGS
Childhood memories of black and white television. The Lone Ranger. “Hopalong” Cassidy. Wyatt Earp. Gene Autry. Gabby Hayes. Bass Reeves. Who? Bass Reeves. He was not on the list of western heroes who filled the screen with 30-minute installments of fantasies about the taming of the frontier. His moment came many decades later when, after a lengthy development process, the limited series drawn from the [...]