Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
MAY 1, 2026 – Long before the Trump Era, I used to muse that “In America one could find the best of life and the worst of life.” This observation was not particularly insightful. After all, we have a population of around 340 million living within 3.8 million square miles spread across 58 degrees of …
APRIL 30, 2026 – Today while I was striding along toward the end of my daily walk, with both hiking poles now in one hand, I heard a neighbor call out. M. was out walking her aging canine friend and approaching the quiet intersection I’d just crossed. I acknowledged her greeting, and since I was …
APRIL 29, 2026 – The sound reminds me of a grandfather clock with a malfunctioning escapement mechanism. Instead of a steady “tick-tock . . . tick-tock” we hear, “tick . . . tock-tock . . . TOCK . . . tick-TOCK” and so on, ad nauseam, day after day. The source of the erratic noise …
APRIL 28, 2026 – Some time ago I wrote here about my directional disorientation during a family trip to Korea in 2000. I constantly confused the east coast of the Korean Peninsula with the west coast. Whenever I saw or heard mention of one side or the other, my brain would confuse it with the …
APRIL 27, 2026 – I remember the monthly departmental lunch meeting at my old law firm when our fearless leader reached the agenda item expressed simply as, “E-mail.” The newly hired techno-geeks had just rolled out the “new system,” and with many senior lawyers kicking and screaming, the venerable old firm was stumbling into the …
APRIL 26, 2026 – Most of the afternoon and early this evening was art and play time with our 10-year-old granddaughter. Today was the last day of the annual spectacular Art in Bloom exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art—an event not to be missed, especially in the company of Illiana. At closing time, we …
APRIL 25, 2026 – If for no reason but to keep tally of the latest assaults on American interests by . . . the American presidency in league with House and Senate enablers . . . today I’d intended to write about those offenses. Random material, however, disrupted my plan unexpectedly. The diversion occurred as …
APRIL 24, 2026 – Late this afternoon I visited our local compost site—after Beth had already hauled a load of leaves to the place earlier in the day. My assigned task was first to corral an unorganized collection of shrub clippings, birch branches, dead day lilies raked out of the garden, and last December’s Tannenbaum …
APRIL 23, 2026 – Having finished reading one book—a “barn burner,” as my dad would’ve called it—by Ned Blackhawk, entitled The Rediscovery of America, I’m closing in on the finish line of another book, The Korean War, a deeply troubling revisionist history by Bruce Cumings, a noted American scholar of modern Korean history. I’m waiting …
APRIL 21, 2026 – Yesterday’s post was a milestone in the life of this blog: it marked the 2,500 time I’ve slapped an “original anecdote, commentary, rumination [or] occasional pontification” onto the board and hit “Publish.” For the first four years, I observed a self-imposed limit of 500 words per post, but with my extended …
APRIL 21, 2026 – (Cont.) Illiana took great interest in the photographs as I displayed them one by one. Many were of her father and uncle when they were young kids, and they brought many fond memories to life. The best of the lot captured the two brothers on the beach by the Sand Bar …
APRIL 20, 2026 – One of the countless wonders of life on earth is that each human being is its own universe. Since the species first appeared, roughly 200,000 years ago—give or take a few millennia—an estimated 117 billion of us have roamed the earth in one state of confusion or another. (According to the …
APRIL 19, 2026 – If ever there were a case for the superiority of experts over amateurs, we’re seeing it play out in the current fiasco over Iran. According to the latest reporting, the sometime Appalachian memoirist JD Vance,[1] along with the stereotypical New York real estate developer Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, all-around grifter …
APRIL 18, 2026 – All the people who’ve died or will die in Africa because of the end of USAID? We’ll never get them back. All the people who will perish because funding of cancer research funded by the federal government was ripped into sawdust by the chainsaw of DOGE? We’ll never get them back. …
APRIL 17, 2026 – (Cont.) In the abstract, “doing one’s duty” and “doing the right thing” sound so simple and straight forward. But as the venerable and inimitable Professor Maynard Pirsig, Sr. (as distinguished from “Jr.,” author of The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) was wont to do in my criminal law class, he’d say, “Suppose …
APRIL 16, 2026 – Whenever my wife and I get together with friends, conversation invariably touches three bases: 1. Health reports; 2. Shared political angst; and 3. Latest streaming favs. Oh yeah, and occasionally, as in always, we’ll talk kids and grandkids. Generally, I try to tune out the health reports, keeping my own to …
APRIL 15, 2026 – Though I’m not a veteran of the armed services, I have empathy for those who currently serve in the United States Army, Navy, Marines or Air Force, especially those who are among the 50,000 service members stationed in the Middle East. That empathy, however, is overshadowed by my support for a …
APRIL 14, 2026 – (Cont.) In many ways, the movie is a celluloid wonder. It had three directors, featured a real live buffalo stampede filmed in Custer State Park, South Dakota and attracted a long roster of the day’s stars: Jimmy Stuart, Peter Fonda, Debbie Reynolds, Gregory Peck, Karl Malden, Richard Widmar, George Peppard, Thelma …
APRIL 13, 2026 – By the time I entered third grade, I was already deep into cowboy and Indian territory—as was the typical white kid view of the Wild West, given the cultural biases that surrounded us back in the early 1960s. This interest arose not from TV shows such as Gunsmoke or The Rifleman, …
APRIL 12, 2026 – (Cont.) A few hours later, I summoned bow and Italian model from the case and warmed up—first with a dozen scales, then with a movement of a Bach partita, unaccompanied, as my favorite “etude.” Next, I re-established Dvořák on the piano music rack and re-positioned my iPhone to record my playing. …
APRIL 11, 2026 – (Cont.) At the ready were my bow and “Italian model”—the sobriquet I assigned to my modern Italian violin, which I’d purchased to bump up standards after the inaugural year of the “Under the Roof” concerts. With jittery hands I placed the sheet music version of Dvořák on the piano music rack …
APRIL 10, 2026 – (Cont.) I’ve been asked to play my violin at the memorial service (for class members no long with us) at our upcoming 50th college class reunion. The occasion contrasts starkly with my “Fiddler Under the Roof” winter concerts, which featured wild and crazy PowerPoint slide shows, hors d’oeuvres and wine (for …
APRIL 9, 2026 – By way of background for new subscribers who are most unacquainted with me, I hail from a family of professional violinists. It all started with our Grandfather, whose mother had died when he was an infant, and whose father, a Swedish immigrant who worked ungodly hours as a Minneapolis streetcar conductor, …
APRIL 8, 2026 – Despite bombs bursting over Beirut, now that the fuse to yesterday’s White House insanity has been cut below the shower of sparks, we the people of short attention spans can turn to other challenges; problems with slightly longer fuses and less prominent dazzle—at least by the measure of “clicks” in our …
APRIL 7, 2026 – At the conclusion of an altogether satisfactory appointment this afternoon, the good doctor wished me well and added, “Let’s hope the world doesn’t end this evening.” The implicit reference underlying his apocryphal statement, of course, was to Trump’s 8:00 EDT deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. Not since …