Kent State and Informed Engagement

May 4, 2016 | Reflection

Today marks the 46th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. I’ll never forget hearing about them, in a barber shop in my home town just before I graduated high school. A guy from a class or two before mine attended Kent State. Wild as these times are, they are...

A Ban on Worry

Apr 10, 2016 | Reflection

One morning during my college years, I dragged myself into my parents’ house at 7 a.m. or so after a night on the town—the next town, actually. My mother was at the door, frantic. As she probed the unprobable fathoms of the teenage male mind to no avail, my father lay...

I’m Old Enough to Remember…

Mar 11, 2016 | Music, Reflection

I’m old enough to remember… …a town filled with World War II veterans, only that’s not what they were to me. They were my dad and my uncles and my aunt and my neighbors and my coaches and the people who owned and worked in stores and shops. Something like 1200...

The Doors: New Book, Long-Ago Moments

Feb 7, 2016 | Music, Reflection

I’m reading Mick Wall’s “Love Become a Funeral Pyre,” his history of the Doors. The book is wonderful. It pulls together most of what’s been written about Morrison to this point and brings into play Wall’s own relatively recent interviews with the band and various...

Of breezes, snow and breaking free

Jan 26, 2016 | Reflection

I felt it in the warm breeze over snow still on the ground. I was in the back yard just after dark, and it took me back to high school, to the way it felt to run through my hometown of St. Marys, from one end to the other after a date, from her house to mine with no...

The Power of Memory: Will, Fred and Lear

Jan 2, 2016 | Reflection

Amazing, the power of memory. I’m reading “The Year of Lear,” a look at the London of 1606 and three plays Shakespeare wrote that year—“King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra. As I read the harrowing scene in which Lear says, “Who is it that can tell me who I...