The Old Oak and the Christmas Tree Place 2025 Preface This story started thirty years ago when my youngest son was 14. I wrote this essay when he was a freshman in college and living away from home for the first time. He’s 44 now and has a family of his own. We had our annual Christmas tree… Read More »
Christmas Memories It’s officially Christmastime. Even for those like me who find the commercial frenzy that drives retailers to start Christmas on Halloween upsetting, Christmastime is here. Unfortunately, many have allowed their greed to overshadow the Christmas spirit and diminish some of the joys of the season by starting Christmas in October. Nonetheless, there are only a… Read More »
Not Fat, Yet… Well, it’s not been a fun year, but it’s getting better. Having two children who live very far apart meant pappy gets two Thanksgiving feasts each year. I’m not known as a temperate kind of guy. So after having a lousy year healthwise, I ate heartily at both feasts… But…I’m not fat. Yet. But… Read More »
Apple John The fluorescent lights of the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit cast a sickly, indifferent glare, turning every surface into a shiny, cold canvas of white and gray. Sepsis had brought me here and stripped me of my strength, my health, and my name, reducing me to a patient ID and a series of alarming medical-machine beeps.… Read More »
The Fateful Chestnut On a cool March day, I was taking my daily 4-mile walk when suddenly – and stupidly – I tripped on a chestnut that had fallen on the wooden boardwalk that winds through the woods. Sadly, this chestnut was not roasting on an open fire; it had fallen on the walkway the previous autumn and… Read More »
Penny: The Witch of 42nd Street The world has changed so much since I was a kid. I suppose every generation has said that. My grandfather saw the first cars, the first airplanes, the first radios, the first telephones, the first TVs, and the first color TVs, and lived long enough to see a man set foot on… Read More »