Mardi Gras with tanks

Sections of the counter newspaper were being exchanged beteen customers. The guy next to me had the A section, the national news.
“They say yesterday’s Mardi Gras celebration was the biggest since pre-Hurricane Katrina,” he said aloud. “I went there once, when I was nineteen,” he continued. “Wild place. Million people from out-of-town.”
He spoke in short fragments. “College [...]

Society’s economic woes mirrored by waitresses

I usually come to the diner weekdays, but last weekend I stopped in on Sunday with Annette for a late morning omelet.
Annette’s daughter waits tables here Sundays. She is one of three part-time weekend waitresses. Each is thirty or younger, went to college, and has another “main” job. This is in contrast to the three full-time waitresses [...]

Searching for Jehovah

Question: What do you call a person who is an insomniac, an agnostic, and is dyslexic? Answer: Someone who lies awake at night wondering if there really is a doG.
That may be an old joke, but it’s often how I feel. For centuries the idea of God has been presented to us by organized religion.  Presented by [...]

Graveside memorial service on a cold day

Last Sunday I attended a graveside sevice for my very first boss, David “Scotty” Caplan, former owner of Scotty’s Shell Station at Twelve Corners in the Town of Brighton. I worked for him part-time from age 16 to 22.
Scotty was almost 97 when he passed away. Seventy people came to his burial. When you’re that old and seventy people [...]

Bird feeder as a mirror of life

A couple days ago I was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast, cognizant of the fact that there were birds at the feeder just outside the window, but paying them little mind since they were run-of-the-mill house sparrows. Suddenly there was a flash of movement at the feeder. By the time I looked, all I [...]

Paradigm shift needed #2: waiting room

I needed new glasses. I usually go through a friend who owns a small eyewear shop with no in-house optometrist. So I made an appointment with an outside optometrist. I had to wait two weeks to get in. I made the appointment for the morning – 11:15 A.M. – so they wouldn’t be running too far behind. I closed [...]

Paradigm shift needed #1: passwords

I had a new computer installed in my home office. I called my regular computer guy to install it, along with a printer and some software. I met him at the house to let him in and hung around to watch.
“We need a password…” he said.
“How about ‘Rich?’”
“It should be at least eight characters.”
“Okay, how about ‘RichardG?’”
“It really should be something less obvious, to [...]

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a German term meaning, “taking pleasure in the misery or suffering of another.” Schadenfreude explains why, at the time of Christ, the Romans took pleasure in watching gladiators gored to death by lions. It explains why in the mid-twentieth century, America was enamored with the antics of the Three Stooges, who constantly hurt each other. [...]

Who “won” the Presidential Election?

Inauguration Day is tomorrow. I fully expect to see Barack Obama sworn in as the first Black U.S. President.
As in most elections, there was controversy surrounding the candidates. In Obama’s case, there was the question of his U.S. citizenship, his relative lack of political experience, and the suggestion of terrorist ties implied by his name. Still, he won the election. [...]

The deceitful qualities of glass

A cup of coffee, combined with an overheard sentence fragment from a nearby conversation, can get me thinking in overdrive. This morning a woman is talking about her son going to a university where researchers are developing glass that won’t break. “You can hold a bottle of Coke at chest height,” she says, ”Drop it on the ground, and it won’t [...]