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Oktoberfest is a 200-year old traditional festival held for 17 days from mid-September until early October in Munich, Germany. Its main feature is beer – about 7 million liters of it each year – along with traditional food (wurst, chicken, pretzels, salted radishes), folk costumes, music and amusement park rides.…
Read More »On a Rhine River trip with his wife Rosemary in 2019, Paul Marion was transported back to 1969 by a dubbed-into-German classic American film. Here’s a poem he wrote about the experience. Also, coincidentally, this Friday, Oct. 9, would have been the 80th birthday of John Lennon, who is mentioned…
Read More »Siggy and Tina By Steve O’Connor More from Germany. Here’s a Steve O’Connor essay from Lowell Sunrise, 2008 Tina is from Bavaria. A few years ago, she was sent from Germany to work as an intern at the Puma branch in Westford where my wife worked. Puma is a German…
Read More »Have you heard of the concept of a “second country?” I heard this recently: The country in which we live is our first country, but we usually feel a connection to a second place. It could be the country that we or our ancestors came from. Maybe it’s a place…
Read More »Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) was a German-American poet and writer who was a contemporary of Jack Kerouac but never a part of the Beat Generation writer scene. Still, Bukowski, who was known as the “Poet of Skid Row” and was called by Time magazine “the laureate of American lowlife” had a…
Read More »For weeks I had noted the increasing height of the plants shooting up from the untended compost pile in the corner of our backyard. With 20-plus years of accumulated organic matter, there was no telling what was growing. One recent morning when I let our 12-year old Yellow Lab Ivy…
Read More »Did Someone Say ‘Coffee’? By Jack McDonough Early in my married life I made coffee in a Proctor Silex which, if I’m not mistaken, consisted of an arrangement whereby the coffee flowed from one glass section to another, up or down, I don’t remember. I probably used Maxwell House coffee…
Read More »A Different Kind of Dying By David Daniel Once a year, in late September, the town holds a drop-off at the DPW garage for used electronics. In advance of the event, notices appear in the community weekly newspaper, and on flyers affixed to telephone poles: UNWANTED TVS, COMPUTER MONITORS, PHONES…
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