Things Fall Apart Back when Cornell was choosing a book for all incoming freshmen (and the entire rest of the Cornell community) to read each year, they selected Chinua Achebe’s 1958 African classic about pre-Colonial Nigeria called Things Fall Apart. The novel tells a story of Okonkwo, a local village wrestling champion as he deals with the advent of white colonialism and Christianity into Africa and how that affects his family, village social fabric and…
Waiting for Enlightenment Life is funny sometimes. Today is the the day before the much awaited arrival of my granddaughters for their Spring Break week-long visit. It has been five years since they were last here. Evelyn was one and Charlotte was four. I think it’s fair to say that this will, for all intents and purposes, be seeing Casa Moonstruck for the first time. Naturally, we’ve seen the girls many times in New York…
You Sunk My Battleship! The war in Ukraine has had many interesting twists and turns, but none more so than yesterday’s sinking of the Russian Flag Battleship in the Black Sea, the Moskva. As all the news pundits have been saying, this was less a strategic military victory than a meaningful symbolic victory for Ukraine, who has claimed credit for the sinking. Naturally, Russia is denying that the ship was sunk by a Ukrainian missile…
Repeating Twenty-five years ago I was attending a function at Cornell University when I met a pleasant young woman by the name of Nancy. She introduced herself as the wife of my cousin Pete. My mother had three brothers and two sisters while she grew up in the town of Lansing in the Finger Lakes area of New York State. One sister died in childhood during a raging flood. One brother and the other sister…
Women in Anything I was raised under a materialistic system of governance. My mother was a professional woman who supported our family exclusively, with no visible support coming at any time from dear old Dad, who was long gone by the time I was four. Mom never lost a step and never complained about any of it. In fact, I would say that she would have been surprised if it was any other way. She…
Hilltopping This morning I was driving to my favorite rock store, KRC, to pick up some bags of stabilized decomposed granite (DG) and I started noticing that every hilltop I could see, and there are plenty of hills around here to offer hilltops, is fully built out with one or two homes. Finding your own hilltop to command a view of the surrounding environs is obviously very popular. When we were in Italy recently on…
Ode to a Patty Melt My stomach has changed in ways that are still a mystery to me. For many years I could and did eat anything in whatever quantity I wanted and it all showed up where you would expect it would. I spent my entire adult life going from one failed diet or program to another. I was in Weight Watchers twice I think. I was in a St. Luke’s trial that was…
On the Shoulder About ten years ago I was in for an annual check-up with my doctor. He was an Irishman working as a GP at NYU and he had a good crisp sense of humor. In my effort to get my money’s worth from the visit, since I never seemed to have much wrong with me, I asked him about my right shoulder. It had been bothering me a little and I tried to…
Expert is as Expert Does Last night was a glorious last night in Rome for us after a little more than a week of enjoying the wonders of Italy. There were several things that made it so special, not the least of which was the venue itself. We had been invited by my Italian partner, Damiano, to join him at a restaurant owned by a childhood Palermo friend of his. That restaurant is on the…
The Young Man Within I am rewatching The Crown, that wonderful Netflix series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II. The current episode starts with Winston Churchill speaking with his assistant, a young blonde woman who acts as his secretary. She is apparently infatuated with Churchill and at the suggestion by him that she spend more time with a young man her own age, she has taken to reading Churchill’s biography to acquaint…