The photo above is of my father, standing before Mount Suribachi during World War II. If you don’t recognize the name of this mountain, then you may not fully grasp the weight of history—or the immense cost of freedom. Take note: there is no flag on the peak, yet. James Thill enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 20 when the United States entered World War II in 1941. He became one of the youngest first sergeants of his time before eventually retiring as a major in 1965. He never spoke to me about the horrors he endured. Later, I…
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My grandson is a water hound, and that fact plus his third birthday put us last weekend at one of those modern waterparks owned by a conglomerate on the New York Stock Exchange that features hair-raising water slides, wave pools, massive downpouring fountains and godawful unhealthy food at exorbitant prices. It’s a decidedly middle America, working class, family entertainment vibe, which today means plentiful diversity not only of ethnic groups but also body types and aesthetic sensibilities. Suffice to say no one would mistake it for the starting line at the Ironman Triathlon. Why is it, then, that the more…
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Was chatting with a coder friend recently about artificial intelligence (AI) and the persistent buzz that it will be replacing countless jobs in the future. Increasingly, those jobs will include the so-called “knowledge” jobs at which I made my living. College education in the humanities, learning how to read, research, think, evaluate and write? Bahhhhahaha! Better at this point to pick up a useful skill such as Certified Robot Assistant in an Amazon warehouse, where your main concern is troubleshooting any complications the robots encounter finding the items Jeff Bezos has promised his customers they’ll receive in a few nanoseconds.…
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I’ve participated several months now in a kind-of book group with a like-minded half-dozen or so “mature” guys in which the little wrinkle that makes it not quite a book group is that we don’t actually read entire books. Instead, we tackle brief essays, generally just one or two per month, of some 3-12 pages each (at least so far). I hardly need mention that essays, especially at this stage of life, have the great advantage of not requiring the long slog of sheer reading time that books do. This helps us all avoid the occasional book club scenario of…
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“Here is a symbol…” begins the Robinson Jeffers poem, “Rock and Hawk,” the order of those in the title, as in all poetry, meaningful. The setting is a “headland” of Jeffers’s beloved and rugged northern California (Big Sur) coast, where we read (and see, through the poet’s eyes), a hard, unfeeling gray rock, “standing tall…/where the seawind/Lets no tree grow…” Jeffers lets us know the rock has also proven unmoved by earthquakes and “ages of storms,” so stout and unyielding it is in its essence, repelling all who would seek to impinge on its domain. With one exception. Because after…
