Past Articles from 2004 until last year. Many important lessons can be found in each of these articles.
If you haven’t taken a walk around our memory garden, you should take an opportunity to do so. That corner of our property each year explodes with color (I count 4 shades of purple and 5 shades of red, not to mention blues, yellows, and pinks) as spring flowers linger, and summer begin to bloom. The peonies are a particularly intense fuchsia that almost makes you squint.
Hanging out in a few airports last week, I noticed the one accessory nearly every traveler deemed necessary. More of us carried this than carried bottles of water, computers, or even umbrellas. It seems the well accessorized traveler will not embark without some reading material at hand. Most of my fellow voyageurs had books with them, although a few were carrying gossip magazines, The Wall Street Journal, or The Washington Post. Children were carrying their Lemony Snickets. Young folks were toting Japanese graphic novels. Adults had Spy novels, Romance novels, Self-Help books, Political tomes, Biographies, and Mysteries. A few had Bibles. Fewer still had one of the classics. I had a New Testament in one jacket pocket, Marcus Aurelius in another pocket, and was carrying Dashiell Hammett – I like to have options.
Driving home last weekend I passed many crosses, big ones and little ones. The big ones were always in groups of three, always on a prominent elevation, and the middle cross was always bigger. Sometimes the middle cross was painted gold. The little crosses I saw were not so uniform in size or number but they were always near the road – never on a hill or promontory. The little crosses were always garlanded with flowers. Sometimes there were notes attached. Sometimes other items lay there. The space around the little crosses had the reverent and offertory effect of the household shrines one sees in the home of a Hindu, or Buddhist.
Phrenology, a pseudo science quite popular in the 19th Century, attempts to do diagnostics and forecasting by examining the bumps on a person’s head. I have an old encyclopedia which contains a quite detailed Phrenologist’s diagram of a human head portioned out like a map of the Balkans. Phrenology may be a pseudo-science, but it is an involved one. If there are any Phrenologists still out there, I think my head would be a good study, as it is as lumpy as a bowl of bad oatmeal – a fact that prevents me from shaving my head.
The baby did indeed have a head full of thick, blond curls you would naturally tousle. This is evident in most photos of him, but the best, I think, is of him standing on a bench, flanked by two Westies and two Scotties. The snapshot was taken in the summer of 1931 – not long after his first birthday, and less than a year before he would be kidnapped and murdered.
