Photo by Frankie Valentine on Unsplash. “We can do without pleasure, but not delight.” -Jack Gilbert, from his poem, “A Brief for the Defense” Delight is an RV parked near the barn of my grandparents’ small-town Missouri farm, where the crab apple orchard, blackberry bushes, and…
Trending on Twitter this week for those of us who “can’t even” on the social media site was the textual meme, “5 Jobs I’ve Had.” Like most things born on the Internet, the cultural roots and class-based ramifications of this deceptively simple list say so much more about…
Avengers: Endgame comes out tonight. My son asked if I wanted to see it in the theater, and I said I could wait for streaming. Many feel differently. Word on the street is that some believe the movie is a defining moment in a generation, the way Star Wars was,…
Understanding the Role of Governments in Regulating Economies In 1681, when a group of French businessmen led by M. Le Gendre met the French Controller-General of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister asked the businessmen how the French state could be of assistance to the merchants. Le Gendre simply replied: “Laissez-nous…
A teen boy broke his leg recently, had surgery, and three weeks later is still bedridden. He wanted to tell me something, he said seriously. I am his primary caregiver, as the phrase goes, which is to say his father and his nurse. As I was shutting the curtains to…
Photo by Rob Hampson on Unsplash. “Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.” –Matsuo Bashō On the day the Lord hath risen, I lost my cell phone between the hours of 8:31 a.m. and 10:38 a.m. The phone, unfortunately, has been missing in action for…
Leaving the restaurant, I saw the poster of a rugby player, covered in mud, hair matted, missing teeth, eye swollen shut. He looked like hell, and I laughed. One of my sons wanted to know what my deal was. I was more surprised at not being able to explain handily,…
An advertisement illustration for Lustron Homes from the late 1940s. Almost every day, by foot or car, I pass by a stretch of egg-colored Lustron houses with square steel exterior tiles in pale yellow, Robin’s egg blue, and dove grey. The porcelain enameled-steel readymade homes were a modernistic…
Going to see a celebrity in a field you do not follow is a strange thing. There are…expectations. Recognition, to start with; maybe admiration, even excitement. I had no idea who the two celebrity fishermen were, who would be at the sporting-goods superstore in town. My elder son, who has…
Photo by Daniel Watson on Unsplash. “The midnight streetlight illuminating the white of clover assures me I am right not to manicure my patch of grass into a dull carpet of uniform green, but…