The Triangle Part 1 Tis the season. A spring breeze wafts through my body, bringing futuristic images of standing in a green valleyed mountain stream casting a fly to anxious trout.  And with the imagined future comes remembrances of things past, of searching the bottom of my boyhood closet for my baseball mitt and Louisville slugger.  Once I gathered my equipment and checked with my father to...

Of Kumquats and Pineapples Polley shared with me a newspaper article describing how stores like Sears and Macy’s were moving out of malls. Replacing them were supermarkets.  One of my failings is that I see every event as an indicator of cultural change.  I have to catch myself and remember Freud’s comment that a cigar is just a cigar…..but that is no fun.  So…..an obvious reason for the...

Robo Calling “Hello.  Is This the Party to Whom I Am Speaking?” Lily Tomlin I am one day home from my hospital stay sitting in my family room surfing afternoon television for something, anything, to watch, my eyes getting bleary from the two hours of reading about James Garfield and his assassination. Ah, Star Trek, The Next Generation, the episode in which Dr. Beverly Crusher keeps losing...

The Textbooks Tablets Debate As my brain continues to forget the details of life (see my blog post, Recoiling at the Lack of Recalling) it worked hard the other day to recall the name of the black cat in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat.”  This was bothering me because Poe’s second Principle of Composition cites “every word must contribute to the emotional effect” the author is...

Cold Storage My father and I were camping on a remote pond, one with ice-blue water, and I had just unpacked a six pack of beer. I looked over at my dad putting together his spinning rod.  “How are we going to keep this beer cold?” “Who says it has to be cold?”   My father served in the Pacific in World War II, an area where I imagine a cold beer was not the norm. “I am not a big fan of warm...