HAPPY NEW YEAR 2025! There are many Americans who are ending this past year with “Good Riddance.”  The sentiment is justifiable, but I...

Winter Solstice 2024 By the fall of 1940, forty-eight Jewish orphans had been rescued and conveyed by Guillaume and his compatriots into...

25 September 2024 End of Chapter 18 THE DAWN These people of England, they the living, buried their dead.  They then seized their grief...

June 2022 Whether to go or whether to stay: it’s an ages old question, a dilemma that can fix the feet of a hesitant soul right where...

Ides of March 2022 The operative words for any half-baked answer to the flying flambé question about what the heck is going on — anywhere...

Thanksgiving 2021 The Story of Chicken Little California Citizen Warnings: No Free-Range Chickens Were Harmed in the Reading of This...

Late Autumn 2021 Les Feuilles d’automne: Autumn Leaves Les Feuilles d'automne is a collection of poems by Victor Hugo that was published...

11 November 2021 Late one afternoon during this past week, I spent a few hours searching for a poem that I’d used for inspiration whilst...

11 November 2021 The Gettysburg Address President Abraham Lincoln There are five known copies of this immortal and eloquent speech. It...

2 November 2021 At long last I have begun to read the phenomenal novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. Last November,...

Columbus Day 2021 From Chapter 13 Education of a Wandering Man Louis L’Amour First publication: 1989 Many of the Army officers serving...

Early October 2021 John Avery Lomax: Preserving the Past The Cowboy’s Meditation The history of the Wild West can oftentimes be told more...

Summer 2020 Sea Fever John Masefield: Poet of the Sea Born in 1878 in Ledbury, Herefordshire, England, John Masefield was perhaps a...

June 2020 It is always best to return to the source of any matter, even if the matter is painful, especially if it is painful. So much...

March 2020 Born in 1839 into a family of superlative artistic talents, Christina Rossetti, the youngest of the brood, developed her...

Halloween 2019 The spirit of the American West was not risk-averse. It hungered for danger, in a way that 21st-century Americans can only...

Columbus Day 2019 I heartily enjoy Elizabethan verse, although many people do not. I’d even considered creating a Great Books library...

All Saint’s Day 2018 Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, defines “anonymous” thusly: 1. with no name known or...

Bard of Scotland The Bard of Ayshire, also known as the Bard of Scotland, was born on 25 January 1759 in Alloway, Scotland to William and...

Summer Blooms 2018 This French Renaissance poet was deemed by his literary peers to be “the Prince of Poets” or « le prince de poètes »....