This September I drove across the northern US, choosing the route partly so I could visit my 48thstate, North Dakota. (Now only Alaska and Hawaii remain.) Another reason was to stop in Missoula, Montana, because I wanted to check on the progress of the new Missoula Public Library, future home of the Hank and Nancy Harrington Children’s Library.
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John
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In Temporary Kings, the penultimate novel in Anthony Powell’s great duodecology Dance to the Music of Time, the fictional composer Hugh Moreland imagines his own demise: “Am I to be suffocated by nostalgia? Will that be my end? I should not be surprised. I can see the headline: MUSICIAN DIES OF NOSTALGIA.”
For me August has been a month of nostalgia,
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John
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In the early morning of June 27, my oldest sister-in-law, Elizabeth Soyster Herrick, died of aggressive metastatic cancer. She left the world gracefully, quietly, surrounded by her three sisters, but way, way too early. Elizabeth was a month or so shy of 70, and four days earlier had driven from her home in Maryland with one of the sisters to a 70thbirthday party in Washington for all her Potomac School classmates.
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John
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This may seem a bit grim, this blog, but as I look it over, I don’t think so. I think it’s kind of hopeful.
Still, sometimes things come straight at us and we start thinking about heavy, hard subjects. Lately one of these has been forced into my mind;
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John
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This month I’m blogging about a book a quarter of which I don’t much understand. There’s my effort at transparency, a theme that will briefly return. A lot more of the book, however, I understand very well, and furthermore, I like and admire the author. So I’m going to praise what I can of it and admit what parts fly over my head.
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In 1980 I started going to Florida to watch spring training baseball during my spring breaks from teaching. It was a way to assure myself that the long New England winter was ending, after all. The first time I flew with my bicycle to Orlando, because my car was a 1951 Chevrolet named Aunt Emma,
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John
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I’ve just finished reading two books, both very different, polar opposites actually, yet with some interesting commonalities. Both are nonfiction, both new. Both were written by friends. Both move with compelling and provoking intelligence. But they are indeed dissimilar. One is by a man, one by a woman. One is about noise,
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John
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On Failure: A Baccalaureate Speech
[In 2008, at the end of my Andover teaching career, I was invited to give the baccalaureate speech at graduation. It was a singular honor, and I wanted to say something that the graduating seniors had not heard before. Here is what I said.]
Thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you tonight.
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John
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Perhaps I have always believed in the great value, even the sanctity, of books. Certainly it has been so ever since I read my first one at the age of six, when my aunt gave me the Landmark series edition of The Wright Brothers.
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John
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Old Blue Rides Again
Had an old car and his name was Blue,
Had an old car and his name was Blue.
Had an old car and his name was Blue,
Betcha five dollars he’s a good car,
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