Category: Holding onto the Past
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Forever I’ve Dreamt Of Sailing Away
One day, several decades ago, I sat down with a book by Captain Joshua Slocum. It was titled “Sailing Alone Around the World”. Capt. Slocum published the book in 1900–it was a bestseller–and it made him a Superstar of the Seas. His boat was named Spray. Nearly ten years later, Slocum disappeared aboard the Spray.…
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Trying To Stay Forever Young
I’m sitting on the deck of our home at Rainbow Lake. A lone chickadee hops from branch to branch and then vanishes into the thicket of trees. I can see the shimmer of the setting sun reflecting from the water below us. Only patches of the lake can be seen, we need to trim a…
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The Migratory Habits of the Boomers
In this lecture we will explore the migratory habits of certain unusual groups of animals. Let us begin by taking a glance at the Puffins of the North Atlantic. They migrate to a big rugged and very isolated rock somewhere in the waters of the Atlantic. There they breed. Then they migrate somewhere. It’s totally…
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Our Appeal To The Great Spirit
[Source: Google Search] It was the icon of our school. It stood in the large foyer of the Owego Free Academy high school. The title of this equestrian sculpture is Appeal to the Great Spirit. The artist was Cyrus Dallin and it dates from 1909. The original bronze statue is at the entrance of the…
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56 Years Along The Blue Trail: Then And Now
Like brave mountaineers, we weren’t bothered much by time. –Gordon Lightfoot It’s late August in the North Country. The green of the leaves and shrubs are looking tired. Some hints of the colors of autumn are emerging from the maples and oaks. Late summer flowers like Black-Eyed Susans and Ragweed are everywhere. The quarter moon…
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Kodak Moment
My son, Brian, just turned 28 on July 14. He is a part of the last generation of people (in America, I suspect) who had their childhood photos of them taken with film. I have boxes stacked in my closet of envelopes containing hundreds if not thousands of pictures of him, my daughter, my family,…
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It Was 28 Years Ago Today: Changing Views
I saw him when he was born. I watched and began to wonder…even back then. I thought about what I had seen. I went to the Delivery Room window, looked out over the parking lot… and wept. Taken in the long view of human life, I had just witnessed something most men have been kept…
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The Empty Bedroom
This was once my bedroom. There was a time when this room was packed full of the stuff of life… From a crib made in the mid-1940’s, I would look out at the flowered wallpaper. Maybe a mobile hung just out of my reach, and moved about when a breeze caught it from a partly…
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Finding Peter
[Lenny is on the left. Peter is happy to be in Pennsylvania] It was here in the Adirondack Mountains that I walked up to the wall of a ranger cabin. It was a far off December night, when my heart and body were young. I had a flashlight in my shaking hand, and read by…
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Unexpected Memories
Seventeen years ago today, my older brother Denny, passed away. It was not a sudden unexpected death but a slow decline with cancer. His family misses him terribly. My brother, Dan and I miss him. I think about him a great deal. We were a family of four boys. Denny was the second oldest, born…
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