FROM SAIGON TO KABUL

Those interested in reading my take on the disaster in Afghanistan can click on this link to an essay I wrote for Politico magazine. It was published on Aug. 21, 2021. Or you can copy the link and paste it into your browser. LINK:...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 32

After a week-long, 2,700-mile drive from Arizona, we arrived back in Connecticut last Tuesday, on time to mark my 80th birthday on Thursday, the 10th. Considering that 600,000 Americans, most in my age-demographic, have died of Covid19 in the past eighteen months,...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #31

We had never seen anything quite like it. At sunset on the day before Memorial Day a band of pinkish light shimmered all along the western horizon except for one broad segment, where a rough triangle, gray-blue in color, rose into the sky. We were at the summit of...

IN MEMORIAM — ONCE AGAIN.

Below are 17 reasons why it’s called Memorial Day and not Picnic and Barbecue Day. LCPL CARROLL FANKHAUSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 8/24/65 PFC ROBERT FERNANDEZ, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/20/65 CPL BRIAN GAUTHIER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65 LCPL REYNALDO...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #29

The drive we made from Norwalk, Connecticut to Patagonia, Arizona, a month ago was very different from the one last June in the opposite direction. The people we met along those 2500 miles were taking the pandemic more seriously, obeying mask requirements posted on...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #28

The malicious little bug called COVID19 is to social interaction, not to mention marital intimacy, as the Volstead Act was to drinking. Leslie spent a week self-quarantined, after being exposed to virus at her hairdresser’s (See #27). She was tested at a clinic...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #27

Yesterday, March 4, Leslie went to see her hairdresser for the first time in months. She has received her first shot of the Moderna vaccine and is scheduled for the second on March 14. The hairdresser, whom I’ll call Jane, had gotten both. She is fully...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 26

A low, lead-colored sky, snow falling (again) as I drive to Norwalk Hospital for my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. It all goes smoothly, in and out in less than half an hour. A security guard checks my temperature, a nurse hands me a form to fill out, attesting...

JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #25

I had my inaugural dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Inauguration Day, a week ago today. This came about as a result of a notification from the Centers for Disease Control that I, as a 75+geezer, was eligible for the vaccine; all I had to do was fill out an online form,...