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That’s the word I used in an early morning e-mail to my friend John Suiter in Chicago, who wrote to me late last night from a city where horns exclaimed victory for the Blackhawks. He described fireworks exploding over Navy Pier and mobs moving down Michigan Avenue. There will be…
Read More »Another smash up at the intersection of Thorndike and Highland streets this morning. Two ambulances, two police cars, one fire truck. From a distance I saw one person on a gurney being wheeled to an ambulance. It appeared that the three cars involved were lined up in the right lane…
Read More »With so many gardens going strong and greenhouses putting out their last tomato plants and marigolds, I was reminded of this poem that was a favorite of mine when I started writing. —PM . Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze Gone the three ancient ladies Who creaked on the…
Read More »Where does this expression come from? So-and-so pulled papers to run for some political office. A Google search yields a bunch of references in Massachusetts newspapers. Revere. Waltham. This expression describes the act of requesting nomination-signature forms for a certain political office from the appropriate official in a town or…
Read More »Okay, I’m a hockey fan, but I’m not a “heek” (a hockey geek). I’ve heard the TV play-by-play announcers refer to the “Merlot line” of Gregory Campbell, Daniel Paille, and Shawn Thornton, one of the Bruins’ supporting lines. What are they talking about, I wondered? I could have Googled the…
Read More »These Bruins are fun to watch. The first two games of the NHL championship series have been as good a display of hockey as I remember seeing. One of the TV announcers quoted a writer who declared, “If these two teams played 100 games, each would win 50.” Maybe so.…
Read More »I don’t know if the program was un-partisan, bipartisan, non-partisan, or post-partisan, but last night’s uplifting presentation by Former First Lady Laura Bush and her daughter Jenna Bush Hager left me feeling that Mrs. Bush has a lot of good work left to do in what she called “the afterlife”…
Read More »Following is another excerpt from my book about the origin and influence of the national park in Lowell, which was written for the National Park Service in 2011-12. If the publishing process goes as planned, the book should be available in spring 2014. ‘Duey’ Kol, who speaks in this section,…
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