Work/Life Balance Throughout my working career, the subject of work/life balance was a constant. We all know the story of the workaholic that overworks himself to the point of ignoring his familial obligations. He comes home after the kids are asleep, he cancels vacations at the last minute. He leaves all the child rearing to his wife. And he always misses the baseball game or recital of his children. I occasionally suffered from all of…
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…
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…
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,…
A Trace of Grits We started out down the Natchez Trace today. The first job was figuring out where the name Trace comes from. As I should have guessed, it seems to be a combination of the definitions to copy and to follow in the path of. It seems this trail was originally one of the old animal trails that were likely created to get deer and other animals to and from the nearest salt…
The Land of Elvis Every once in a while an entertainer comes along that captures the imagination of the nation and ascends into immortality. In this generation that honor seems to belong to Taylor Swift, but in my generation no one ever got bigger than Elvis Presley. He represented and transcended the decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s all at once. Very few of us that came of age in those years could deny…