Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
JULY 13, 2025 – This afternoon I received a call from Erik Ibele. I hadn’t heard from him in several years and was pleasantly surprised when he announced himself. He’d called to inform me that his father, Warren E. Ibele, had died recently. Warren would have turned 101 next month. Erik and his three siblings, …
FEBRUARY 15, 2025 – In these times of great rancor and bitter despair; division and anxiety, we must celebrate the people whose life works exemplify humanity at its best. This afternoon I found myself[1] among 200 people in just such a celebration inside Westminster Hall at the sprawling campus of Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown …
MAY 10, 2024 – Next to the Holland cottage was the Violet compound occupying the sweeping rounded corner where the west end of Rice Street and the south end of Levee Avenue blended together. As the maxim of real estate valuation goes, “location, location, location.” Though the lot was across the street from the Mississippi, …
FEBRUARY 25, 2024 – Whether your career has been bagging groceries, teaching generations of first-graders, pushing paper then its digital equivalent in a government office, playing clarinet for decades in a symphony orchestra, filling prescriptions at the last standing locally-owned pharmacy, restoring thousands to health in an operatory of the cardiology wing of a hospital, …
JANUARY 1, 2024 – The day before I was to undergo a stem cell transplant in treatment of multiple myeloma, he and his wife Sally visited us on our back porch. Don had just been diagnosed with liver cancer, metastasized from duodenal cancer, it later turned out, and was slated to begin his own treatment …