I’m posting about items and events I find interesting:
memories of second grade, visiting William Faulkner’s
home town, starting a diet to combat diabetes.
You get the range.
John
8 Comments ↓
There was a presidential debate the other week (9/28/2020). You might have noticed. It was dreadful, and I’m not going to say anything more about it. But it did stir me to action. Actually, one of my granddogs, Ocho, got there first. He posed for a photo:
It seems clear that – old as both of them are in human years – at least one of the candidates has the maturity of a five-year-old.
…
John
2 Comments ↓
Sukiyaki
The Past: In order to understand the confusion I’ve been laboring under in getting this post ready, readers need some ancient history – i.e., Williamstown, fall, 1965. The college was busily dismantling the august fraternity system. Some houses were sold to the college, which turned them into “social units,” essentially buildings that functioned as eating,
…
Recall my blog posting of last month, “Pandemic Communication”? I’m taking a break from my job publishing daily notes from my Williams classmates. Below is my departing letter to my classmates as editor, at least for the next few months, as Joe Bessey – my co-secretary – takes the reins.
…
This month is a report on what I’ve been up to for the last two months. I am one of my two class secretaries for the Williams College Class of 1966. Normally every now and then I collect news from as many classmates as I can smack into action and edit their contributions into a column for Williams People,
…
John
1 Comment ↓
It’s been a tough month, March has, and we’re well into April now, with no sign of being able to go outside and play. So we’ve had to make our own fun. Material for this blog is being provided by my two sons, their wife or fiancée, and their dogs.
…
John
6 Comments ↓
In Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, the compose Hugh Moreland explains to the narrator that he expects to die from nostalgia: “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” (Temporary Kings,
…
John
6 Comments ↓
For the past few weeks I’ve been coping with a scam: a check-washing scam to be precise.
The story starts on the first of the month. My wife, our two sons, one daughter-in-law and one almost-daughter-in-law went to Santa Monica. We hiked around a park for a while,
…
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.
…
John
4 Comments ↓
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,
…
John
8 Comments ↓
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.
…