Straight From The Hart

FELINE GHOSTS... Feeling ghosts around me today Shadows of cats I have known Feline ghosts, I call them, Cats who have made this their home. Sometimes I feel the gentleness Of soft fur nestled close in my arms And it seems I can hear the soft purring Of remembered kitty cat charms I see them move through the shadows Just a glimpse, then out of my sight Sometimes it’s the white tail tipping That I see in the dark of the night The movements are quiet and fleeting I see them at nighttime and day Just figments of my imagination Grayson, Annie, or Ollie at play. They knew this house was their castle They reigned in each room where they played They slept when they wanted and ate all they could Feline memories stay close, they don’t fade. It’s autumn that I really miss them When hickory nuts start to fall I can see kitty faces so precious In the windows that line up my wall The hickory tree looks in the windows As squirrels

My column in Lebanon newspaper 10/12/16 I opened my Wall Street Journal Monday and turned directly to the Opinion page as I always do, and the headline “Straight Talk About Christopher Columbus” by David Tucker immediately caught my eye.  My mind went back to the 1980s when I wrote for the Springfield News-Leader and I wrote a column about Columbus Day.   It was a rather innocuous essay, as I remember, recounting my memories of stories our school teachers would tell us on Columbus Day, and how we would color pictures of the ships sailing out on the ocean or make our own ships out of construction paper.  And then we would recite the poem “In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue”.  But it seemed to provoke the ire of another columnist at the newspaper and she took after me in a column of her own.  That was the first time I realized that Columbus Day could be  controversial. That is, until this year.  Seeing Tucker’s column was just the first indication on