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Black Fingernails and Calluses By Mark Cote Every old man wants to tell the story of when he was somebody. When he knew what to do, where to be and when. When he had a routine to his day, even had a title at the job he spent more than…
Read More »Low Tide on the Merrimack By Cody Kucker The river’s dropped beneath the bundled scraps of wind-pruned trees, abandoned now and dammed. Stray branches split and thin the rivulets, silvered and made vitreous by the sun. Canals form, levied by skippable stones that, like the branches, have carried here and…
Read More »Grand Jeté or the Great Leap in Popular American Ballet By Malcolm Sharps [Author suggestion: Listen to Copeland’s Appalachian Spring while reading this] No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and…
Read More »The B.F. Butler Cooperative Bank was founded in Lowell in 1901 by members of the family of Benjamin F. Butler, the notable Civil War general and Massachusetts politician. The bank continued in operation until 2010 when it was acquired by People’s United Bank. I recently found an old but undated…
Read More »Boarding School Blues By Louise Peloquin Chapter 8: Quick showers Andy, Titi and Blanche found moaning and groaning about strict teachers, boring courses and endless homework quite enjoyable. Among the top contentious points was the shower rule. Like a lot of teenage girls, they all liked to dilly-dally in the…
Read More »Typewriter Romance By David Daniel In graduate school I had a little Royal manual typewriter with a carrying case. A high school commencement gift, it had seen me through my undergrad years, and on it I’d written a lot of letters, papers, and short stories. Now I was on the…
Read More »Mike McCormick, a Haverhill native who has lived and worked in Alaska since the mid-1970s has become a regular contributor to this site. Last June, he filed a report on the pandemic as seen from Alaska. Today, he gives us an update one year into it. Our Pandemic Year: An…
Read More »March 17, 2021 – With the pandemic lockdown still upon us, we are deprived of our “traditional” celebration of St. Patrick’s Day. This Paul Marion post from March 17, 2011, captures what Lowell is usually like today. For me, it evokes some nostalgia and brings some hopefulness for the not-too-distant…
Read More »In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, here’s a post from eleven years ago complete with some of the comments left at that time. Even though corned beef is not regularly consumed in Ireland, we eat a lot of it on St Patrick’s Day. But I have a couple of questions:…
Read More »Timing is Everything By George Chigas One day last week, I hoofed it up to UML Lydon Library to get a couple of Inter-Library Loan books for an article I’m working on about how Kerouac actually met Neal Cassady at Columbia in December 1946. The basic facts are generally well-known,…
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