October 2014
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We were playing punchball on the PS 217 "big court." It must have been during school hours because Mrs. McGowan (a fifth grade teacher) was the umpire and the players included the entire population of the class, not just the regulars. Michael Lurie, the least athletic student in the grade, and perhaps in the entire borough, was told to play third base, and obviously unfamiliar…
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My friend Mike, who is pushing eighty very hard, told me this story. "In the 1940s we lived in Sarasota, where the Red Sox held spring training. I had had rheumatic fever and my mother over-reacted and kept me in bed for years. Nevertheless, I was an altar boy and I also would get out of the house whenever I could to…
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There's a brief sentence in The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth that continues to move me no matter how frequently I return to it. I's a passage that resonates in my latter-day soul. Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet (whose name, obviously, indicates her profession) are old acquaintances and old rivals who are evermore at odds. "They never meet but they fall…
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Waiting for the train at the White River Junction railroad station, I met a young lady, a graduate student at Dartmouth. We engaged in a brief conversation. I asked about her ambition and plans. She said, "I want to be, like, a college professor." Like yikes. Like double yikes.
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I read Planet of the Bugs (Chicago, 2014) by Scott Richard Shaw, a Wyoming entomologist. It's a good book on a great topic — the evolution of insects. In the acknowledgements, Shaw thanks his editor for helping him to "shape a bulky manuscript into a sleeker book" but I think I would have much preferred the fatter unpublished…