21st Century Pen Pals

I am on Facebook, one of the better known “social web sites.” Users of Facebook get to designate certain people as “friends.” Mostly it is simply a place to leave each other messages.
My site has remained mostly dormant for the several months I have had it. My real friends generally communicate with me more personally: [...]

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Green space, white space

I was raised in the country. Real country. My folks owned 50 acres of woodland in the middle of several thousand acres of woodland in a part of the state that was mostly trees and big rocks.
Imagine Gettysburg, with nothing but a few scattered houses between Gettysburg and, say, Arendtsville. Then make believe I lived [...]

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People everywhere just got to be feared

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States.
One of the cardinal rules of survival, I was led as a [...]

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To Stay, or to die

A girl once told me she loved me, but she could not be happy for me, could not even associate socially with me, because I had not been “saved.”
Several years ago I attended school with the daughter of a close friend. After class, she and I would sit in the parking lot for an hour [...]

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Busting myths about “illegals”

“Illegal aliens,” by which most of us mean Mexicans, have been taking a lot of blame lately. They are, we are told, diluting our culture, taking our jobs, and demanding free medical care, free education and flaunting our laws.
I respectfully disagree.
If King John of Portugal, in the 1480s, had seen the wisdom of discovering the [...]

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