It was an evening in the mid-1970s and I was riding with my dad in his pickup. The AM radio was tuned to 1180 WHAM and Ed Hasbrouck’s talk show was on. The topic was the American economy, which at that moment wasn’t doing very well. Ed was recalling the bank failures of the Great […]
Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam As we prepare to bury the life we have known And accept that from now there’ll be no going home Your money’s no longer worth saving The meat is all gone, we’re left nothing but bones For the times, they are a changin’ Apologies to Bob Dylan, but […]
It’s hot in Vermont. It’s been in the 90s and humid for weeks. This is great for cherries and plums, grapes and apples. My neighbor’s been making cherry jam for days (add a hot stove to the equation) and she’s had to prop up the boughs of her plum tree, so heavy are they with […]
Vermont had its first AMBER alert last week. (AMBER is an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, a cumbersome tribute to Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996.) Twelve-year-old Brooke Bennett disappeared on the 25th of June. Stories soon circulated that she had lied to her mother about where she […]
There are a number of opinions about the Bible and, as is too often the case, they tend to divide, rather than unite us. Some people think the Bible is the unerring word of God, each and every verse. Others think it’s “divinely inspired,” but perhaps not absolutely correct in every respect. Other people – […]
The walls are closing in or, if not the walls, then the groundwood sheets of newsprint, the pixilated screens of the news that never stops. Maybe this is the way we should feel at the end of eight years of presidency/puberty. It’s bad enough having teenagers in the house, but when the house is the […]
Three Days on Wall Street
Twenty-one years ago this month, Wall Street plummeted, losing 508 points in one day. We beat that record Monday, when the market lost 777 points. The difference is that in 1987, the market was trading between 2,000 and 3,000 points, whereas Monday – or before Monday – the market was hovering around 11,000 points. I […]