November 2022
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I've arrived at the age in which even a momentary lapse of memory is worrisome. Have I at last begun the ineluctable descent into senility? But then there's the contrary. When I happen to dredge up some bit of buried knowledge, I experience a rush of triumph. I feel it as evidence that I've put…
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When I was a Brooklyn schoolyard "yoot" (sixth or seventh grade I reckon), I impulsively bragged to a group of fellow ragamuffins, "I'll bet a buck that the Dodgers win the pennant." What prompted me to make so uncharacteristically bold a claim? Way out on a limb, I was. One of the guys in the…
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I seem to have plowed a path of destruction, suicide-wise, in my earlier years. In 1958, I studied "intermediate algebra" with a cheerful, well-regarded teacher named Ruth B. White. One Monday morning, she wrote her new name on the blackboard; she was no longer Mrs. White; she was now Mrs. White-Green. Her supportive students, I…
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Like many of my peers, I've lately taken to reading the obituaries. When I was a youthful fellow, I took pleasure in announcements of births and weddings and anniversaries. No longer, alas; nowadays it's nothing but deaths. Reading about the departed is not a habit of which I'm particularly proud. It's an unsavory fixation upon…
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The world's ugliest building, or at minimum a top competitor for the title, is located just a block or so down the street from our present abode. Too damn close, in fact, because it broadcasts its miasma of aesthetic gloom directly at me. It's a large ungainly brick cube — windowless, characterless, featureless, probably designed…
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Alas and alack, I've now known far too many folks who have endured serious memory problems. As a consequence, I seem to have developed an interest in amnesia not only in real life but also in fiction and film. There are many many books on the subject and Wiki offers an astonishing list of 234…