From the Left
/Politics
Serious Numbers
I hope someday to be 100 and writing myself a birthday column, but I'm a ways from that event.
What I am is 67 and writing myself a birthday column, which is serious enough. I've been writing this column for 15 years now, and that also seems like a serious number.
Hell, they're all serious numbers. The number of years you are when you get ...Read more
Trump in Contempt
A judge with a keen grasp of the obvious recently found possible felon/president Donald Trump in contempt.
After 40 years as a reporter/columnist, I haven't had to type "possible felon/president" very much, but I didn't have to type "climate change" or "nonbinary" either. Things change.
Trump, who has an at best slippery grasp on reality, ...Read more
How Are Things in the Old Country?
Thirty years ago, I was in a garment factory, covering the visit of a Portuguese dignitary who was in the factory because it employed a large number of Portuguese immigrants.
The dignitary approached a short, muscular man who worked in the plant and greeted him smilingly in Portuguese.
The man spat out a single sentence in Portuguese and ...Read more
The Last Sin We Have
Joe Biden. Donald Trump. Bill Clinton. According to always-reliable social media, these men are pedophiles.
It doesn't stop with them, either. According to even foamier-at-the-mouth sources, nearly every world leader and celebrity took trips to "Epstein's Island" to have sex with children.
Do you want to know why pedophilia is an accusation ...Read more
Where Eagles Dare
Bald eagles. Big, feisty, fighting creatures. Lousy fathers sometimes.
They're like your cousin Richie, is what they are. This is why you hope Richie isn't showing up for your aunt's wake. He'll show up drunk and want to fight your cousin Nelson.
Richie has kids in your town, and the two nearest towns, the ones close enough to be easily ...Read more
A Severe Absence of Rats
Sitting in courtrooms isn't an art. It is the process of hibernation, being asleep enough not to hear everything but awake enough to hear anything important. It is the light semisleep of a man whose pregnant wife is two weeks overdue and sleeping next to him.
Reporters know the day's action in a trial is likely to hinge on one evidentiary ...Read more
The Things I Used To Do, Lord, I Won't Do No More
My father spent the last 13 years of his work life at a sporting goods company, where he was an assistant department head.
When he retired, 34 years ago, he had full and complete rights to a pension of $241.86 a month. He died five years later, and my mother received $241.86 a month for the next 34 years.
And that was my father's life, that ...Read more
Blackfellas
Movie scene: A car pulls to the curb on a downtown street. Four men wait inside the vehicle. They're white. All of them have slicked-back hair, pinkie rings, shiny suits and shirts with long collars that almost cover the knots in their ties.
A man walks down the street, not seeing the guys in the car.
(Because the director of the movie is ...Read more
Toora Loora Loora
Sure, and it's a little St. Paddy's Day story from my grandmother.
She was Irish American herself, and in her childhood, there were a great many people in her life who had come from Ireland.
"If you said Ireland was a bad country, they'd fight you in the street," she said of the Irish immigrants. "But if you got a bunch of them together, no ...Read more
On the Road
It's Newt Night. Frog Fest. Salamanderpalooza.
The temperature is brushing up against 50 where I live, and it's been drizzling for a couple of days.
And so, the amphibians, the goggle-eyed, slightly slimy dwellers in marsh, swamp, creek, pond, slough, and sluggish, shaded stream, are making their way to the spring pools where they lay their ...Read more
We're Getting the Band Back Together
I don't live in the kind of city that gets Lady Gaga live for one night, or Taylor Swift.
I live in the kind of city that gets a Journey tribute band that sounds just like Journey if you're drunk. Sometimes, at some limping, underfunded civic event, we get a band that still has one of the original band members from the days of their greatest ...Read more
I Was Country Before Beyonce Was Country
The old man's idea of paradise is inertia.
Right now, there's an old woman looking sadly out the window of her apartment, seeing the vacant store where the "good" bakery was, or the kosher deli, or the bar with the neon shamrock in the window. The Dominicans and Haitians who moved into the neighborhood didn't have much use for those places. ...Read more
Crying Over Spilt Beer
There's probably still a bar that uses the old beer schooners. Maybe in Chicago or Topeka or Bemidji, one of those towns with a flair for the traditional, for ethnic sausages and casseroles and good barbecue.
The schooner, if you remember, is a beer glass with a wide base, then a thick glass stem that suddenly blossoms out into a heavy glass ...Read more