Category: Memories
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The Day Bob Dylan Dies
[Source: Google search.] This is not an obituary. It’s not a eulogy. It’s a foreshowding. I’m a sensitive guy. I’m seventy years old and I cry at the final scene of Casablanca, several times during Dr. Zhivago, and at the end of Sleepless in Seattle. I make no apologies. But, lately, my generation (mostly the…
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Love At The End Of The Tunnel
[My photo. Elias leaves pre-K.] The longest and most uncomfortable, painful and seemingly endless flight I ever undertook began at 4:00 am on Monday, November 20 when I forced myself out of the bed. I forgot our wakeup call was for 4:15 am. Our flight was scheduled for 7:00 am. It was going to be…
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The Quiet Feast/The Great Cycle
I felt the breeze… I stumbled on a tree root when… Finally, we reached the pond… Concentrate. Start over. When I was a teacher I was often given the dubious privilege of “lunch duty”. A room, nearly the size of a gym, filled with 5th & 6th graders…or 9th & 10th graders, and a hand…
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Fathers and Coffee
One more cup of coffee before I go… –Bob Dylan [My photo] This gray, almost monochromatic morning, I lounged in bed reading yesterday’s New York Times. It’s something we did every weekend for years while we lived in Manhattan. The…
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A Halloween Ghost Story Told To Me By My Niece.
[Photo source: Google source. This is not the spirit girl described.] My niece and I share a fascination with stories. Many of them are odd and unusual. Many of them are ghost stories. I’ve shared copies of ghost story collections with her over the years, mostly M.R.James and Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany. All were…
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At The Museum…For Decades
[I loved this Alaskan canoe when you could see the people in it.] The more things change, the more they stay they stay the same… -Anon. I never understood the above quote, except to say that I think it means that history repeats itself. I certainly can get that…considering the Trump Era. You can figure…
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On Front Street At The End Of October
Different times…different places…different memories… [Photo source: Google search.] I should mention that, as a child, one of my favorite things to do this time of year was to kick a pile of leaves along a stone sidewalk. It’s gloomy, rainy and windy here in the North Country. It rained hard before dawn this morning so…
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Confessions Of A Gravestone Photographer
[At work in St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Chateaugay, NY] I would strongly object to anyone who would dare call me morbid. It is not morbid, in any sense, to appreciate and love old (and new) cemeteries. It is not morbid to stand over a grave of a total stranger and contemplate his or her life. I…
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The Summer We Never Had Is Gone
“I see your true colors shining through…” -Cyndi Lauper Green is still the dominant color in the foliage around Rainbow Lake. Each day, however, brings out a few hundred more leaves that have lost their Chlorophyll and are showing their true colors. We’ve had our first frost warning on my weather app…and that was in…
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The Toboggan
When I enter our garage from the door that faces our house, I don’t often look up. What could be up there that I’m avoiding? Well, there is an old oak bed head-board and foot board that was mine when I grew up at 420 Front Street, Owego, NY. There are stickers of cowboys and…
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