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…
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…
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…
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:…
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,…
From time to time through the pandemic, I have posted updates to capture the events and the look and feel of that moment in time. Almost exactly a year ago today I did my first. I called it “Covid-19: March 12 edition” never imagining that I should have included “2020”…
Boarding School Blues By Louise Peloquin Chapter 7: Beginning to Belong Blanche and her classmates stepped up to the academic pace. Freshmen followed required courses such as English, algebra, biology and social studies. Because the school had been founded by a religious order from Québec, French had a prominent place…
Recent events on the Lowell School Committee have drawn attention to the method used to fill a vacancy that occurs on the School Committee (which is the same for the City Council, as well). Since the city’s adoption of “plurality voting” in 1959 – that’s the system in which all…
A Windy Treatise on the Development of Theogony By Steve O’Connor Well, March certainly came on like a lion. I’m sure you all remember the night of March 1st when the wind, to quote Bob Dylan, “shook our windows and rattled our doors,” and howled around the eves. The wind…
My Mother, Smoking By David Daniel A recent editorial in the Sun reports how Massachusetts’ ban on menthol cigarettes has cost the state a lot of tax revenue, while, simultaneously, tobacco sales in neighboring states without such a ban have spiked. I know almost nothing about public tax policy and…