"When Scott Lerner returned from Israel, he stayed in a YMCA. He did not particularly want to stay in a YMCA, but he had no good alternative. ... Once he had friends in this town, but that was three years ago. In between had come the war, in between had come the oil embargo. He did not know how … [Read more...]
“The Drifting Dream Is Done” – Pogo, Lewis Carroll, and the Age of Coronavirus
I don't remember what birthday it was that I received The Pogo Stepmother Goose as one of my presents. Maybe the eighth? The ninth? That was about the age that I adored the now mostly forgotten comic strip "Pogo" by Walt Kelly. So much so, that I made a little pennant out of flannel and, … [Read more...]
These Do I Remember – COVID-19 and the Yom Kippur War (Part 2)
(Continued from my previous post.) We'll be safe here, the director of the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research told me, the night of the day the Yom Kippur War began. And we were. On that Yom Kippur--October 6, 1973--Egypt and Syria had launched a coordinated attack across the … [Read more...]
These Do I Remember – COVID-19 and the Yom Kippur War (Part 1)
How quickly it all came upon us. Not that we couldn't have seen it coming--we knew what COVID-19 was doing to Italy, which is a whole lot closer to us than China. Yet we continued to deny. Even last week, I still imagined it likely that the bookstore launch of Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story … [Read more...]
The Messiah and the Whirlwind – A Nativity in August
August seems an odd time for a story about an infant Messiah born in Bethlehem. But the recent occurrence of Tisha be'Av--literally, "the Ninth of the month Av" in the Jewish calendar, which fell on August 1 this year--brought the story to mind. It's a good story, although in some respects a bit … [Read more...]
