The Stone Menagerie In the 1944 play, The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams wrote an autobiographical memory story that launched his writing career and put him into the Pantheon of great American writers. It is a subtle story about a middle class American family with a mother living below the standards to which she had become accustomed from her youth, a father that is woefully absent, an underachieving son who yearns for independence and a grown…
The Man of the Decade There is an old story about Donald Trump creating a phony Time’s Person of the Year cover to hang in one of his golf resorts. When we all heard that, we felt it was a pathetic sign of what a narcissist Trump is and how desperately he craves adoration and attention. This week, Trump has legitimately made it to the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “If he wins”.…
Campus Unrest I feel like I am reliving my youth. During high school in Rome in 1968-1970, I watched the United States wrack itself from afar over the issue of the Vietnam War. I watched students get shot at Kent State and radical blacks take over the Willard Straight Hall student union at Cornell, the closest thing I had to a family school, as the place where my mother had attended. The similarity of those…
Vax Redux Last fall Kim and I were very diligent about getting all vaccinations that were being advised for people of our age by the CDC. We had the latest COVID booster. We had our regular annual flu vaccination. We got the pneumonia vaccination. We also got the RSV vaccination so that we wouldn’t catch one of those nasty deep lung infections. They checked the status of our shingles vaccinations, but we had gotten that…
The Abortion of Humanity I have long considered abortion to be one of the thorniest policy issues in American politics. It strikes me as one of those issues that galvanizes people to the extreme and yet one that can be debated on grounds of morality ad infinitum. Ignoring the politics of the moment, the dimensions of the issue involve gender equality, primordial imperative of procreation, libertarianism, privacy, cultural norms about sex, the balancing of individual…
YOLO It seemed more than coincidental that the first story on today’s New York Times The Morning is an article on the universally prevalent thought process involved in people’s ongoing wrestling match with time and how to use this, their most precious resource. They mentioned the term YOLO in that article and I have to admit that I had to look it up. You Only Live Once is yet another version of my favorite tag…
This is America This morning, as I prepare to spend the day going into the airport zone, my suspended animation state I adopt when traveling, I am affronted by two things I see on the news. The first is the back and forth that took place yesterday in the Supreme Court over the issue of presidential immunity in the case of Donald Trump v. The United States of America. While I still have a good…
It’s Happening… I am sitting in Eastern Tennessee in the heart of what surely is red America. We are wrapping up our trip here to Tennessee and the Deep South with some Smoky Mountain touring. We will go up on an aerial tramway to a wild animal sanctuary in Gatlinsburg and then come back here to Pidgeon Forge to end our visit with the Dollywood Stampede, whatever that is. It’s been an unusual and fun…
Dollywood Nocturne Today we are scheduled to spend the day at the Smoky Mountain version of Disneyland. The theme park was created in 1986 under the banner of the region’s highly popular country singer and performer, Dolly Parton. She is co-owner of the park, which is located in a place called Pidgeon Fork, Tennessee. We are heading up from Chattanooga in order to be at the front gates at the 10am opening time. The park…
The Buc-ee’s Choo Choo Today is our Alabama day. I’m going to take a wild guess that northern Alabama is not so very different than northern Mississippi. I’ll bet the residents of those two places might vehemently disagree, especially at a college football game between the two states, but to a southern neophyte like me, it all looks green, verdant and rural. We will further test that theory today as we drive from Tupelo. Mississippi,…