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.
The “hatchet man” for President Nixon, and a chief architect of both Nixon’s “dirty tricks” and the team of “Plumbers” who schemed to smear, libel, drug, and, in at least one case, even assassinate the president’s vast list of “enemies,” lived not just to endure the stain of a criminal conviction and seven months in federal prison, but seemingly transcend it. Watergate historians, however, are not so kind.
Costco is the best place I know where I can enjoy other families and especially their children, now that I do not have a child in my own home who routinely brings other children into my life. At all costs, one must avoid appearing to pay any unwanted attention to any child.
Life after prison often felt like one step forward, four back. In the desert years, what made Carole Alden’s life meaningful was trying to make conditions better for her animals. While the world struggled with wars, political, economic, and social chaos, she was grateful for qualified solitude.
I treasure memories of tomahawk-throwing at Fort de Chartres, sitting in a voyageur canoe, and watching costumed troops drill. In some way I am still trying to unpack, it helped set up my young mind to think of this part of the Midwest as perpetually colonial and the West as something for the future.
Not once did its wood frame break down, groan under weight, or so much as emit a creaking whine. Credit must be given to the Danes who designed it and then brought it into existence. But credit must also be given to its generous spirit. My old sofa, dubbed “El Trono,” never gave up. And I never gave up on “El Trono.”
A Giant Among Giants is not a “life and times” biography. It does not situate McCovey in the social and historical contexts of America beyond baseball. The book is mostly stories and quotes from various ballplayers of McCovey’s era (1959-1980), speaking well of him, of course, but providing a vivid portrait of the man as a ballplayer.
Why is it only certain characters among my friends—the recovered addict who got rich off disaster services, the photographer who did federal time on a RICO conviction, the former scout and paratrooper with traumatic brain injury—tell me they love me? My polite friends, the “normal” ones, the ones with long, seemingly solid marriages and steady white-collar jobs and no priors, do not say such things, despite often having been in my life longer or more directly.
I am not sure which would appall my mother more: “dip chiller” to name her receptacle for delicate, extravagant shrimp, or me asking an artificial intelligence to remind me what she taught me.
Wallace wrecked his political career with his run for the presidency in 1948. His biggest mistake was not quitting the government when Roosevelt was in his final weeks to take over the leadership of the liberals, as Eleanor Roosevelt begged him to. But perhaps he knew he would wreck his career. Perhaps he wanted to, as, after all, he did not really have the makeup to be a successful politician. But he was one of the most important political figures of his time.