Going Home Someone leaned over and said, “You live here. You must have gone to a lot of these things.” I nodded. The organist was warming up at the front of the Old Chapel at Fort Myer. “A dozen?” the man asked. I smiled enigmatically. “I wish it were just a dozen.” Death Junior told […]

(Soviet Echo II-Class nuclear Guided Missile Submarine) I had been sweating my part of the eulogy. Not hard, but it was something I needed to do and hadn’t got to. The pressure had some off, and as you probably know I work better with a deadline staring me in the face. Well, the deadline is […]

So the snow of yesterday has gone. It was slushy for a few hours, but the streets were clear enough, even if people were panicked.   The City is getting a little punch-drunk with the white stuff. We normally get one or two snowfalls a season, and it is a matter of high emotion and […]

(03 Feburary Snow at Tunnel Eight, Big Pink. Photo Socotra.) The snow kept up all night. When I got up I went straight to the balcony to judge the depth of the disaster and was impressed, though apprehensive. I could see black below the slush on Pershing Drive, and that meant cross-country travel might be […]

(Operation Homecoming Flight Arrives at Clark AB, RP, 1973)   I looked morbidly at the on-line edition of the Times this morning. It is just turning gray. There is stuff to do this morning at the office, and I have guests coming from a long way off. I need to do something about that, but […]

  Something quite ordinary happened in the wake of the great mobilizations required to ensure victory over the Kaiser and the Fuhrer and the Commissars, and a sad compromise in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam.   Dick Nixon told us that “everything we knew about Vietnam was wrong,” except for the end of it. […]

(A Zumwalt-era Beard on USS Midway sailor) The drive home covered 768 Miles in 11 hours and 20 minutes. I was moderately interested by the pace, once I got the car parked in the garage, since it was the night of the same day I had departed the little town in Michigan, and I had […]

(Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt. Official Navy Photo.) It is colder than shit outside this morning, bone chilling even in the guest apartment where I stay when I am here in Northern Michigan. The wind is still hammering the side of the building and blowing the lake-effect snow around the driveway. It is time to start […]

My sons are roaming around the island where they were born this morning- or better said, they are asleep, six hours behind us in the Midwest, and they will rise, in good time, to gentle breeze and an embracing climate redolent with the smell of blossoms.   There is lakes-effect snow here, and the temperature […]

(The Brand New Ilikai Hotel, Waikiki, 1965)   The crunch of the snowplow outside- a few cursory passes by a man in a dirty white pick-up truck- signals the call to the breakfast table and the start of a new day with the folks. I am not far on Mom’s List, which includes printers and […]