Category Personal Reflections

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
—Joseph Conrad

***

Last week while reading through the latest reports of Russia’s continuing atrocities against Ukraine, I found myself suddenly bursting with indignation, yelling at my laptop as if I were 10 years old and made aware for the first time that the world can be a horrible place in which horrible things happen to undeserving people.

Many nations of the world are ‘doing something.’ Many things, actually, costing many dollars. But a powerful and potentially world-altering question lurks under those commitments: Is it enough?

Muttering obscenities about Vladimir Putin, indulging the thought that I would happily strangle him with my bare hands had I the opportunity, I was struck yet again by how incredulous it is that one nation (one man, actually) can simply decide to eliminate anothe...

With friends and intimates, we continue to talk of many things as we go about our daily lives. But those lives don’t feel quite the same as they did just two weeks ago, because our world no longer feels the same.

Barely under the surface of most every interaction, every move hither and yon tending to errands, exercise, shopping excursions and, poetically a couple of mornings ago, our first view of a newborn gifted by posterity to young friends, there looms the specter, the worry, the hope, for some sliver of good news from the battle unto death the Ukrainian people are currently waging against the Putin invaders.

It is a battle, make no mistake, that they are waging on behalf of us all.

Perhaps it is our own vulnerability, among other factors, that seems to be weighing most on us as we tiptoe toward a spring that may be delayed severely for our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, or perhaps never experienced a...

No bombs fell in downtown Durham yesterday. No rockets slammed into City Hall or its police station. Most of us here, and I assume pretty much the same about you, went about our appointed tasks and pleasures, tending to jobs, walking dogs, meeting someone for coffee, picking up kids or grandkids from school, getting a hearty something out on the dinner table to feed body and soul.

The basic stuff of life, which we often take for granted and then look back on as its best, most memorable and enduring pieces that we take to our graves with a gladdened heart.

That said, my day was only partially like that, because a good part of it was spent obsessing about the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian dictator and war criminal Vladimir Putin.

I couldn’t do enough reading and watching and listening to slake my thirst for absorbing the full impact of this momentous and horrid event, potentially the most consequential ...

A modern wedding scene on the dance floor, amidst the mostly late ’20s-early ’30s crowd that are peers of the newly betrothed. It’s been a couple hours since the vows and dinner and multiple, somewhat long-winded toasts that seem to have become an obligatory feature of weddings today. (“I first met Sam in third grade when…”)

Then comes the new hubby-wifey dance to their own special song, its dying notes prompting the DJ to finally crank up the music and the pace as all the waiting young’uns and no small number of old’uns stream onto the dance floor. (It’s early yet, and everyone feels young and renewed at a wedding—at least for a while.)

Their single-minded goal: to commence the dead-serious ritual of celebrating the young couple and expressing all the good mojo they feel in bearing witness and immersing fully in such a joyous occasion.

And “immersing fully” is what the dancers most definitely do.

As the...

You reach a point in life—I’m not sure when it began but I know it has—that your people—friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, teammates— who have died begin to rival in number, and feel as present to you, as those who are still living. This represents some kind of turning point no one ever alluded to in my formative years, when they suggested all the exciting things awaiting me in my maturity.

No one ever took me aside back then in a candid moment and intoned, “All they’re saying is true, but at a certain point, you will also begin to suffer loss upon loss, and it will last until the very day you, too, will perish from this earth.”

Much as we suspect that might not be the most helpful and inspiring bit of wisdom for an elder to pass along to a youth in bloom, I’m not so sure it wouldn’t be at least as helpful as the traditional exhortations along the lines of, “You can be anything you w...