There are maybe a couple dozen thousand families in this great land who are going through the same sorts of things that we are.   I happen to know three that are in some sort of loopy parallel with ours, and I was looking blankly at the big screen as the National Basketball Association resolved […]

(Gazpacho a la Matt)   You want something poignant and profound about the human condition?   I didn’t think so. Enough. I humped my sorry guilt-laden butt out of the chill gray Northland. Dad announced that he wanted soup for breakfast; Mom produced a can of bean soup with savory ham chunks that I had […]

(Great Books, in stack by the bed.) Time to get out of the Northland. There will be an airplane waiting down in Traverse City, seventy miles away, maybe.   No way to tell, and the contractor who serves the Delta system is a bit cavalier about schedules and the like. Things are more organized out […]

(Football Fans with plastic trumpets- Photo Coca Cola of South Africa)   I was chatting with a pal in Germany over the weekend when she remembered that England was playing the U.S. in that strange game that everyone cares about except us. It is in South Africa, as you may have heard. I have had […]

(The site of the previous really big deposit of strategic minerals, before this morning) This is a whole new ballgame Up North, and in the Theater of Operations as well. Odd that they come together as they have.   I can’t get away from the war, it appears, or rather either one of them. I […]

(First Ranger image of the Lunar surface. NASA photo.)   Being Up North this time is about the collision of the past and the future, me being stuck in the eternal now. It is a challenge, but not in a bad way. Just confusing. Mom came out last night looking to see if I was […]

The faces around the table last night have known one another for nearly sixty years. Mom and Dad were there at the beginning, of course, and they are the last ones left of their generation. The Cousins are here as a sort of interim valedictory visit.   Can’t tell what is going to happen, and […]

(B-29s with Mt. Fuji. USAAF picture.) November of 1944 was a tough month for all the rookie crews on Saipan. They had crossed the vast pacific in their virgin aircraft and were now confronting the dual enemies of distance and Japan. This month was the baptism of combat, since it included strikes against heavily defended […]

  (“Tokyo burns under B-29 firebomb assault.” May 26, 1945. Army Air Forces picture)   Bill McCullough wants to get out the story of his first cousin, Harold. It was first told a long time ago in an Air Corps in-house organ commemorating the day the first two crews of Brigadier General Emmet O’Donnell’s bomb […]

(Isley Field, Saipan, filled with Super Forts. Late 1945. Army Air Corps picture)   Bill McCullough is a Great American. So is his cousin Hal, a survivor of Crew 17. I will tell you more about his crew tomorrow, but the stories of how they bombed Japan and survived their thirty-mission compact with fire and […]