It would already have turned to 11 November on the Continent when the event occurred. The commemorations of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the 18th year of a new century would begin shortly, and head in this direction across the still-dark sea.   We have turned the holiday into an event […]

(The Ludendorf Rail Bridge, 1945)   The anniversary of the Fall was yesterday, or so they tell me.   I wrap my life around that long ribbon of concrete. It went up in 1961, when I was ten and the notion that our little suburban town was in imminent danger of being incinerated by Soviet […]

OK, I know you can’t keep everything. We cant do it for our own lives, much less expect to carry other people’s stuff around.   Why is cleaning out the home of a parent or elderly relative so difficult? Better to just have someone else do it, avoid the whole confusing mess of emotion and […]

(We’re here to help!)   The day was quite remarkable in its clarity and the texture of the season, and it was possible to shed the red sweater and roll the window down on the Police Cruiser. It was a day that called out for examination, the light golden and lightweight.   What surprised me, […]

(HumVee Stuck in mud.)   The Baptists are at it again. I’m sure you heard; it is what always happens after a big attack on unarmed people.   The shootings were immediately condemned by the Council on American-Baptist Relations. They had to do it, since the latest mass murder started out with the usual chilling […]

(Dr. Hasan and Hood) It has been a good week as things go, though I had no idea how over the top it could go.   I drove up to Thurgood Marshall Field- BWI- to pick up some Jersey Lab guys who came down by train for a meeting with some government guys I cooked […]

I am just saturated and not completely happy about it. Grumpy, maybe, though maybe others would call it creeping old-fartism. I got a call at dinner about someone who had just passed away in Maine, of the same sort of thing that is dragging my Dad down by the ankles.   It was good to […]

(The Moon at full)    I was fourth in line at the Culpeper Gardens Assisted Living Facility this morning.   That is our local polling station, and I walked with one hand in my pocket and the other clutched around my travel cup of coffee. The time change is harder to manage than it used […]

(Kelly’s Ford Marker at the Inn at Kelly’s Ford)   Young Major John Pelham had a memorable December in 1862. The host of General Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Potomac was moving out of Fredericksburg, resplendent in their blue uniforms. Pelham’s Alabama Creoles had their “Napoleon detachment” of light mobile cannon hitched up and ready […]

March 17, 1863. Major John Pelham, “The gallant Pelham,” was 24, and there was no more bold a soldier on the field on either side of the struggle between the states.   I was driving down to see where he caught the splinter in the brain. He was a man of parts, you see, with […]