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A Small Frame For Life’s Big Picture

Our family has cut way back on Christmas presents in recent years. We all still enjoy filling some desires from the grandchildrens’ wishlists. Honestly, they are the only ones who really need anything. But I have a problem, and it is probably a hangup going back to my childhood. I want everyone to have a package or two under the tree. A few years ago, we set a modest limit, so the gift shouldn’t be big, fancy, or expensive. It just has to be wrapped and tagged “to and from” so everyone gets to feel special. We are such a small family that giving each other a small gift is ...

Sizing Up The Winter Of 2026

It’s a real winter—at least that’s what all my neighbors are saying. It’s not a real winter unless local people say it is. They know. And I’ll take that one step further: it’s not a real winter unless someone who was a child in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s says it is. We grew up in the Ice Age of Western New York, after all. Not only did we grow up in it, we walked to school in it, we were forced outside on Saturdays by our parents to go play in it. We took our road tests in snow storms, delivered newspapers by climbing six-foot snow banks, and walked two miles in ...

Finding The ‘One Thing’ In Life

By J. Paul Lombardo One of my favorite movies, (and its sequel, too), that almost always stops my channel surfing when I’m doing that is, the Billy Crystal, David Stern, Jack Palance Western, comedy, City Slickers. As many times as I have seen these movies, and even though I can recite most of the movie script, it never stops me from laughing out loud when the parts I find funny (and that’s a lot of laughing), occur. There was one conversation in the first movie which showed the soft, gentle side of the appeared rough, tough, “leathery” character, Curly (Palance) when he was ...

What’s With The Warmer Temperatures?

Let’s pick up where we left off 148 weeks ago. Not even you, faithful reader of this column, will recall that we were well into March 2023. By turning on the snow machine then, Mother Nature appeared to be trying to make up for a lack of snow during the preceding winter. “No,” we told Mother Nature that day. Winter sports enthusiasts of all ages need snow in December, January, and February. But in March, it was too late to make up for what hadn’t fallen from the sky when we needed it. * * * Fast forward to this winter. Children are looking forward to building snow forts, ...

For Old Times’ Sake

An old friend of mine, pretty much of the same vintage, sent me an email suggesting that the words of Auld Lang Syne (roughly translated as meaning “for old times’ sake”) might be an appropriate topic for a column at New Year’s. I will give it a try. Most of the research I have done attributes the song to the Scottish poet, Robert Burns in 1788. There were other similar songs written prior to that, but he made it famous. The other person who made it famous was Guy Lombardo and his band, the Royal Canadians, who started playing it on New Year’s Eve in this country in ...

Beware Lessons Of MTG

I am one who likes to keep up to date with news and politics, but I tend to avoid the back and forth soap opera that comes from the personality and who said what of Washington. But lately I haven’t been able to avoid thinking about what has become of Marjorie Taylor Greene. The once MAGA loyal to a fault bombastic warrior of the House has decided to call it quits after speaking out against Trump. MTG has made the rounds on TV on a forgiveness tour, cleaning up her appearance while also voicing her objections to Trump fighting the release of the Epstein files. She has been doing this ...