The Communist Precedent for Republicans Buying the Stop the Steal Myth
Many people have been amazed by polls indicating almost 70 percent of Republicans believe the lie promulgated by Donald Trump that the 2020 election was infected by massive fraud and stolen by Joe Biden, despite the complete lack of evidence and the abundant evidence...
Playing the Covid Odds
We’re all shooting craps against Covid these days--playing the odds as we feel our way to deciding what to do (and not to do), and struggle to get back to some semblance of life as we knew it without taking dumb risks. Which of the many longed-for activities we’ve...
Music II—Inching Up The Foothills Of Jazz
This is an account of how, at the age of 61, I found myself whining with frustration, afraid of humiliating myself, and then fired by my piano teacher—all part of a journey that's nevertheless been a highlight of these twilight years. After traipsing around the Dobbs...
Mask Up and Vote in Person
Call me stupid, as some of you undoubtedly will, given that I have the trifecta: “advanced” age, a compromised immune system, and a chronic lung condition. But I’m planning to vote in person, and hope that others who can possibly do so will too, especially in...
My Life in Music – Part l
It began on Christmas in Dobbs Ferry, New York when I was about six, which would have been 1958. I woke my sister Debbie before dawn to get a jump on opening presents. Ripping away the wrapping paper, I discovered a book around the size of a comic book: the Trapp...
Loon Shots
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a loon. She made a fool of me. It was August of 1978, on the first day of a 100 mile canoe trip with my college roommate on the iconic Allagash River in northern Maine--the same trip Thoreau memorialized in his Maine Woods...
A Merganser’s Master Guide to Homeschooling
6:15 am, June 17, 2020Poland, MaineWhoosh! A loud fluttering sounded over the chorus of chirping birds that had already awakened me. Turning quickly to my right, I looked out the large picture window and caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a duck in flight headed...
Are We Still Having “Fun”?
I spent a weekend in Manhattan back in the fall of 2018 with two old college friends: Leslie, a documentary filmmaker who’s lived in Paris for many years, and Bonnie, a recently-retired high school English teacher living on a cattle ranch in the Kansas Flint Hills and...
Watching My Trees Grow
I like to think of them as my trees, two sibling white birches rising out of the bank of Thompson Lake in Poland, Maine. They arch towards the water, just a few yards beyond the screen porch from which I’ve watched them grow since their infancy. I probably shouldn’t...
A Boomer’s Defense of Millennials
As far as I’m concerned, Millennials get a bum rap. The criticisms Boomers and Gen Xers heap upon them have been well-chronicled: They don’t have the same work ethic “we” did; they expect to be pampered and given only “meaningful” work; they flit around from job to...