Straight From The Hart

My column in Lebanon newspaper October 14, 2016 When you are a columnist and you are  coming up against a deadline and all the wells of thought seem to be going dry, you tend to latch onto any chance remark that might replenish the seedbed somewhat.  Such was the case this week.  I had been, since a week ago Saturday, fully involved in a very tedious process of catching up on financial records and other filing on which I tend to procrastinate until pushed to the very limit, and I had lost track of where I was in the week, even to the point of forgetting what day it was. So when Ken York, the patient editor of this newspaper, picked up on a remark from my column last Saturday about becoming friends with Sarah Overstreet after several years of rivalry when we were both writing for the Springfield newspaper, I was grateful for the opportunity to visit the concept that when you get to know somebody, instead of just knowing about them, it opens up a whole new world. M...

Monday will be Memorial Day.  The mere mention  of the holiday generates swirls of memories in my mind.  Our observance of the day has probably undergone more changes in the seven decades I have lived than any other holiday we have throughout the year.  Tradition tells us it started as a way to honor the Civil War dead, but soon included all military graves, and now we decorate the graves of friends and family, too. Graves have been replaced by urns containing  ashes, and today many people have memorial services instead of funerals.  I’m not making a judgment with regard to that, just recognizing that once again things that were familiar to me so long ago are becoming more rare today,  like the fact that it is mostly the older generation who now decorates the graves. My Grandma Dame always called it Decoration Day.  That was back when we observed it on May 30, regardless of what day  of the week it fell on.   I  disli...