Exactly one day after the Fall 2010 semester ended, a student in my Technical Writing class  appeared at my office door to explain why he had not submitted a major assignment.  He had tried to start writing it, he told me, but, for some inexplicable reason, he found he “couldn’t/… Read full post »

Duane has twelve pairs of athletic shoes.  A dozen pairs, high-end, superstar-named.  All twelve pairs are white, pure white, a white so dazzling it blisters the eye.  He takes the time each evening to clean the pair he has worn.  It is light duty, though.  He is careful, so/… Read full post »

I periodically have a dream that, generically, is not uncommon, though I suspect its content might be.  It is the dream in which one discovers a previously unknown room in one’s house.  In my version, I am in the basement, walking past the furnace, when I suddenly notice a door in/… Read full post »

Lately, I have been thinking about joy.  An effect of the season, no doubt.  We are warmly greeted and best wished.  We are told, exhorted, to be merry and let nothing us dismay, to be of good cheer, to be happy.  And we are told this is a joyous season, a/… Read full post »

We quote to reproduce a source exactly and to provide the tonal core of the source’s voice or the impact of its expressive power.  We paraphrase to restate that voice, that expression, in our own words, avoiding thereby the distracting iteration of quotations or the charge that we have don/… Read full post »

The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By altering the genes of the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans, one can slow their aging. The result is that the worms live much longer and they remain youthful and healthy longer. The current record for enhancing C. elegans longevity is… Read full post »

We hate to wait, and we especially hate to wait in checkout lines, especially in grocery store checkout lines.  We are all allotted one and a half billion heartbeats, and we are loathe to expend more than a couple of them in checkout lines.  No matter how long we have shambled/… Read full post »

Each year my home hosts two visitors.  They arrive separately, each at the same time, year in and year out, without fail.  They are anticipated, and, while not particularly welcome, for I issued no invitation, they are not unwelcome, either.  I suppose you could say that they invade my/… Read full post »

My backyard trees are autumn-adorned, brocaded in deep scarlet, reddish gold, honeyed amber, and sassy yellow—tongues speaking in hued accents a chromatic carnival of color, a retinal assault of beauty so rich, so dense, that, had it mass, its weight on my shoulders would bend my back.  I/… Read full post »

Mom bought every Elvis 45 available at the local record shop.  Dad rarely bought records, but, when he did, he purchased Perry Como exclusively.  I think Mom liked the raucous energy of Elvis’s straight-up rock ‘n roll, and the sentimental sadness or the fervent affirmations of/… Read full post »

The last time I was in a Catholic church was for my Dad’s funeral mass last October.  The last time before that was for my Mom’s funeral mass the November prior to Dad’s.  The last time before that was a friend’s wedding six months before Mom’s passing.  T/… Read full post »

During most of my freshman year at Pacelli High School, my best friends Jim and Mark and I gathered every morning before school at the DX gas station two blocks away.  We smoked, swore, drank a Coke or an Orange Crush, gobbled down some Junior Mints or Milk Duds, and assured/… Read full post »

The backyard view from the kitchen’s breakfast area looks out on one of the garden’s accent pieces, the butterfly bush.  The shrub is easily five and a half feet tall, and each shoot terminates in a panicle, a pyramid-shaped blossom consisting of tiny, densely-packed purple flowers.&… Read full post »

My patience, always a dwindling and, I’ve come to think, nonrenewable resource, has, at long last, been thoroughly tried—tried and convicted of aggravated aggravation with skepticism aforethought.  What was it that shanghaied my forbearance and drove me to this illicit state?  A/… Read full post »

I said to my wife Kathy, “I think I’m going to get a scooter.”

“Have you been watching The Wild One again,” she asked.

Oh, Kathy is a wise woman.  She knows that The Wild One is my second-favorite movie of all time.  The brooding Brando as Johnny St/… Read full post »

In his 1969 book Rumor of Angels, sociologist Peter Berger discusses “signals of transcendence,” the “reiterated acts and experiences” of everyday life that point beyond it.  Play is one such signal: it forms an enclave separate from the facts and necessities that… Read full post »

Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) was stunned, simply and stupefyingly stunned, to find  in the uncatalogued  box of Robert Frost’s heretofore unknown golf poems a poem written by Wallace Stevens about the pitiable state of Frost’s golf game.  Your IR speculates that Frost and/… Read full post »

In this fifth poem from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a pygmied scintilla of self-acceptance, maybe, even, a peeweed soupÒ«on of the beginning of the start of the birth of the onset of the inception of wisdom.  Perhaps, though, your IR suffers/… Read full post »

Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a “change of mood” in this fourth selection from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, a change that, in a small way, saves some part of a day he’d rued.  Frost faces a small crisis: his only golf ball has right-angle sliced into the woods. … Read full post »

On a recent afternoon, an acquaintance concluded a conversation we were having outside the downtown drug store with these words: “Take care.  Nice talking at you.”  A gesture of linguistic informality, no doubt, that “talking at,” and yet, as I walked home, I thought/… Read full post »

Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) here offers a third poem from the manuscript, Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, that he found mausoleumed in the basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library.  As do so many of the poems in the manuscript, this one depicts Frost’s fraught fetishization of his incomp/… Read full post »

Readers will recall that your Intrepid Researcher (IR), while poking about in the mildly mildewy basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library, discovered sepulchered there a box of uncataloged materials a manuscript containing poems written by Robert Frost that detail his travails with the  game o/… Read full post »

In yet another scientific study that tells us something we already knew, research to be published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that prayer calms anger.  In the study, participants who received demeaning comments on an essay they wrote displayed less anger and aggression/… Read full post »

It is not generally known that the poet Robert Frost was an avid golfer.  Unfortunately, his avidity for the game was not in the least matched by any skill at playing it.  On the golf course, Frost exhibited ineptitude’s ineptitude; it was artlessness syncopated by lavish bungling, in/… Read full post »

For Thoreau, social conformity creates a dull and deadening averaging tendency.  He ends Walden with a parable about a “beautiful bug” that, having been deposited as an egg some sixty years previous in an apple tree, gnaws its way out of the kitchen table built from the wood of that/… Read full post »