The Comfort of Jackets
More than most clothing, jackets last for years, so their most important quality, the accretion of stories, has a chance to build modestly, privately.
More than most clothing, jackets last for years, so their most important quality, the accretion of stories, has a chance to build modestly, privately.
I stressed I was not interested in joining their group but would like to write about their outdoors training, if they would let me, or else we could just say we had had a nice lunch, and I would go on my way.
If you have ever cared for an addict, you know the desperate feeling of no easy solutions. Science has no inoculation or cure, so treatment is a combination of lengthy and often expensive behavioral and pharmacologic therapies that still depend on “the individual’s desire to change,” as LAM puts it.
Strong feelings shaded yesterday’s total solar eclipse in North America, ranging from worries about terrorism against big crowds gathered in rural areas, where first-responders would be overwhelmed, to fervent hopes for the rapture.
Being a socialist in the United States requires walking a narrow path between admission of defeat and ideological hope.
Chris Bruneau, who is no naïf, understands his odds with different eventualities. He also knows that as a junior congressperson, he would be expected to toe the party line, but he is trying to present himself, at least in conversation, as something closer to what used to be a centrist.
I entered the town of Gettysburg from the west, through battlefields marked with picket fences, cannon, and statues. The town was crawling with tourists.
Since it is not far from there, mere seconds in flight time, to the crash site, one is made conscious of how low the aircraft was at that point, of how little time was left, and of the terror of the people onboard.
In the American South racial violence and disenfranchisement made job openings in Northern factories short on labor seem like the possibility of escape to “the promised land.” But the expense of public transport, the dangers and inconveniences of segregated waiting rooms and modes of travel, and the problems of finding food to eat when restaurants and stores often refused to serve Black travelers, made the self-guided and -paced car vital. It represented freedom.
I had been thinking about how long I had wanted to see the Connecticut coast, where my Griswold ancestors—the middle portion of an unbroken line of fathers and sons going back to the year 1200—first arrived in the Americas, but I was not planning to visit on this trip. It felt like a missed opportunity, but the drive was already long, and, besides, I knew my end of the story.