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Get Off The Couch, Get Off The Tech Toys

Pope Francis, the oustpoken spiritual leader of the Catholic church, recently spoke of a subject near and dear to many parents. He implored the youth of today to get off the couch and put down their tech toys. He wants them to get more active in their communities. I started to smile.I recalled a public directed commercial depicting an overweight adolescent sitting in front of his computer. He called his grandmother and asked her to get him another soda pop. He used his handheld phone to call her on the house phone. She and he were a mere few feet apart. The look on her face was ...

Writer Gets Her Kicks On Route 66: Part Three

Editor's Note: This is the third column in a series featuring the author's travels along Route 66If you have never considered a road trip on Historic Route 66, especially if you are 50 years old or beyond, you should start thinking about it. Not that I am hinting that your days are numbered, but you are old enough to relate and maybe even remember, much of what you will see on the trip.I had read that it takes a week to drive the route, but two weeks is better and four weeks is best. I would say, since it was our fourth day and we were just nicely getting into Missouri, the second state ...

Where Genius Bloomed: Herman Melville’s Arrowhead Farm

Herman Melville's vast and enigmatic creative mind led to some of the best novels in American Literature, "Moby Dick" at the top of the list. They're an odd mismatched bunch of books though, which begin with several autobiographical tales of the sea in order and end with the truly peculiar "The Confidence Man." To know Melville, a reader must recognize him as a sailor, a wanderer, a quester. He married, yes, and had children, but it seems he was never genuinely happy but for a short period of time in a sprawling farmhouse called Arrowhead at 780 Holmes Road, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ...

Editor’s Note

When I've consumed a lot of fluids my body tells me it's time to visit the lavatory.It's a simple concept, listening to what your body tells you you need to do. I don't want to mess myself, that would be embarrassing.I think this is why potty training is so difficult.We're on our fourth student, the last of his class, and he's falling behind in his studies. His predecessors, I remember a few bumps in the road, but never this bad. The one time our oldest flunked resulted in some footprints in the classroom, an experience I'll never forget thank God we were renting that facility at the ...

Standing At Ground Zero

I volunteered at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11. A friend and I drove down to New York from Massachusetts where I lived and we served meals to firemen in a food tent near the still smoking, devastated site.Restaurants in the area supplied trays of food to the tent all day long and people brought cases of water and soda. You might remember how the people of that city, the people of our country and the whole rest of the world, seemed to be doing what they could to help ease our collective pain.One day, a policeman who had come through the tent a few times asked my friend and I if we ...

Ellington Mom-And-Pop Earns Rave Reviews

Even though my husband and I seek out mom-and-pop restaurants, we've driven by Dave and Bev's Diner at the four corners in Ellington more than once without giving it much thought. That is until recently when we stopped in for their Friday fish fry, which was one of the best I've had in the area. Not only was the fish very good, the baked potato was perfect, which is not always the case with restaurant potatoes. It also came with pineapple cole slaw and a thick slice of freshly baked bread. There are many five-star reviews online indicating that we didn't just happen to stop on one of ...