Words To Live By

Recent weeks have found me plying a new-found pleasure: installing bird feeders in our treeless backyard. Our most frequent visitor has been the English sparrow.

This ubiquitous bird was first introduced into the United States at Brooklyn, New York, in the early 1850s. He had but one mission: clear the trees in the parks of canker-worms. [...]

Advice to anyone contemplating retirement: finish your “important stuff” before you retire; there won’t be time afterward.

Why? Retirees forage for time and resources, often consuming too many available hours that could otherwise be applied to the aforementioned “important stuff.” Consequently, I’ve developed guidelines to help me decide how to separate important stuff from other stuff. [...]

The phenomenon in physics known as “conservation of momentum” has a practical explanation: an object in motion resists attempts to change its speed or direction. The same is true of life.

When “old” people used to tell me that each year sped by more quickly than the previous, could I understand? No way. A year’s just [...]

My move to electronic communication can hardly be described as voluntary. Simply put, a testy magazine editor demand that I use email if I wanted to do business with him.
So I quickly scrabbled to collect the requisite hardware and researched the few email services available in that pre-internet era. All required hooking the computer [...]

Even in 5:00 a.m. February darkness, familiar sounds and sequences define my world.

Yet before this bleak hour, the first morning sound had already greeted me: a persistent clattering of the bedroom blinds. Maudie Nell insisted that I let her out. But I fiercely ignored her until she uncharacteristically stalked back to bed.

My cell phone (which [...]

Peering out the window, I twitch… until the mail arrives. Then snatching up my bills, I scamper inside to pay them.

Hello! Are you awake? Yes, you heard that right. I do enjoy paying bills these days.

But let's draw a clear distinction. Only the process appeals to me; the tightwad forever eschews releasing his money.

Let me [...]

I write this on December 20, 2004, which would have been our daughter Jenny's 32nd birthday. And I well recall the events of December 20, 1972.

We had gone to the hospital for what we had expected to be a routine delivery. But complications, punctuated by Jenny's grand mal seizures, dispatched any semblance of normality.

I brought [...]

At last! The perfect pen!

I don't recall the origin of my quest for the perfect writing instrument. In high school, the zipper pouch inside my three-ring notebook bulged with candidates: No. 2 cedar pencil, chunky mechanical pencil and ballpoints exuding gooey ink.

A Wearever cartridge fountain pen eventually replaced the leaky ballpoints, but I never embraced [...]

Solid black with rotary dial. That was the standard choice in telephones when we married.

But the 1984 telephone deregulation flooded the market with new phones and services. We soon adopted touch-tone models and hung one in the kitchen. With its 25-foot cord, Mary could glide through chores with phone to ear, a necessity for a [...]

Can twins be born three years apart? I say yes.

The two individuals I base this conclusion on don't share much facial resemblance. But their thought processes, mannerisms, voice intonations, emotional responses and interests are teasingly "twinish."

This is remarkable because they lived together under "normal" circumstances for only nine years. Then in 1959, their mother's death [...]