The New York census of 1860 described denizens of the city's Fourth Ward thusly: Mary Sullivan, 22. Ms. Sullivan's birthplace: Ireland; the value of her personal real estate equaled nil as did her personal wealth.…
Posts published in “Essays”
I am having a very hard time understanding why this City's leaders are so hell bent on helping those who obviously aren't trying to help themselves. And I'm not talking about the few who are…
I don't want to poke at any sore spots — I am nothing if not sensitive to the triggers and flashpoints of the paper's readership — but the thing that gets me through the week…
The northwest corner of Germany is called Ostfriesland and with respect to organs of recognized historic value it claims to be the most densely populated region of the world: there are nearly two hundred in an area the size of Rhode Island.
On this first day of August, 2015, as darkness gives way to daylight and the cobwebs of sleep are swept away by a slowly dawning clarity of mind, I wonder what this deep silence is all about. Our thirteen-year-old cat Django is what I refer to as an alarm cat. Like clockwork, promptly at seven every morning, rain or shine, he begins to yowl for his humans to feed him. Marcia does not hear the morning yowls of our large gray shorthaired kitty, or so she claims, thus I am the human who most often rises to feed Django at the beginning of each day.
Obama, Percy Shelley, Louis Armstrong, Helen Thomas. These are the people with the same birthday as mine, the ones I choose to claim. Not Sheldon Adelson, who fits perfectly in Las Vegas and hopefully will…
P.S. 30 was an elementary school in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. It included grades Pre-K to 5. Mott Haven was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Bronx. Rates of Tuberculosis, AIDS,…
It was early on a Sunday morning, a little after dawn, in 1891, and the Eureka-to-Ukiah stagecoach was slowly working its way up a steep grade, when a man stepped out from behind a tree.…
Monday. July 27, 2015. I’m coming home from Fort Bragg, heading south on Highway One in my little old white Toyota pickup truck, going fifty-miles-per-hour. The time is one o’clock on a warm sunny day.…