For the resourceful and the resilient, there will always be something else to eat for breakfast. Still, how interesting would it be if we let the high price of eggs direct our thoughts and actions beyond the simple matter of cost?
With the current spate of Canadian-led booing of the U.S. national anthem at professional hockey games, answered by American-led booing of the Canadian national anthem, these strains converge into parallel lines of history. One has already been written in the War of 1812, while the future of Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods and threats of annexation as “our 51st state” is anyone’s guess.
What we need desperately from pop music and rap artists, and what is in short supply now, is not rivalry for its own sake and spectacle, but a sense that our favorite songs of the future might have something immediate to say beyond the context of two individual artists.
I have no hesitation declaring “To Be or Not to Be” perhaps the greatest film of all time, nor should anyone else. That is not written for effect. I mean it, both in emphasis and a level of insistent aggression that, if you have not seen it, stop what you are doing and watch it forthwith.
Somewhere between pages 25 and 30, showcasing my daughter’s fourth-grade photo and Christmas of 2015, the images cease, as if my photo album took a different route from my own at some mysterious fork in time. Somehwere between the physical world and the ether of the digital, years slipped away, as if they never took form.
Through centuries of existence, in a multitude of translations, and in myriad versions and bindings, the Bible has never mustered victory in any battle besides sheer force of influence. Even then, and up against all the glories and benefits its believers promise, it still finds plenty of ways to fall short. Put both of those qualities together, and you get a book everyone should read, even in taxpayer-funded public schools.
What Turner’s remarkable painting of that long-ago night in London reminds us, though, is that if fire’s wrath is not ours to contain, it will always remain dormant and waiting for our homage, whether framed or not.
Rather than skulk in the corners of history some of the most turbulent figures in radical left terrorism found fertile afterlives in popular culture, both film and music, that treat them alternately as doomed romantics or curious, bizarre artifacts.
We seem unable to acknowledge the greatness of the 1990s not because we cannot remember its halcyon spirit but because we refuse to.
‘Small Things Like These’ neither lifts the heart nor breaks it. Instead, it is a quiet story suspended in the hopes of what Christmas might mean in years to come—and could mean now, this very year, if and when we find courage enough to search for it.
Readers old enough to remember the golden age of magazine and newspaper columns can hold their heads in despair, or they can pick up the latest collection of works by Calvin Trillin, a Missouri native (Kansas City, to be exact) and a master of the form.
The future is written faster than we can read it, but that does not mean we cannot try, even if all there is to see or read are backs turned toward us, or eyes looking away. One trick of being a capable parent is not overplaying your hand or pressing your argument. Just do your best to see what your child sees.