“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Before my father’s death, I sat with him and asked questions about his time in the Pennsylvania State Police, specifically where he had been posted and how long he had spent in each Barracks. He graduated from training in April of 1938 from an old Albright College campus in Myerstown. The building is still there. It is now the home of an evangelical seminary. The graduation ceremony took place in Harrisburg. So many troopers […]
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I spend many mornings holding binoculars to my eyes and watching birds come into feed. I keep a daily list: juncos flitting like little groundling bats in the early dim light. goldfinches, male cardinals popping that red especially on gray mornings, nuthatches chitting continuously, purple finches, jays tucking their wings against their bodies and diving straight down from their perches in the dead maple like arrows blurring blue-white, one […]
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I have watched so many more movies than I have read books. I remember the original King Kong on the Five o’clock Movie, the stop-action movements of Kong in a black and white so vivid and engulfing that at 7 or 8 I became entranced. I have remained entranced. If you love movies, it may be because they sweep you away like a benevolent, inspiring riptide, a long blissful and tumultuous […]
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The road is largely untraveled this early. The 3 dogs and I can walk down the middle, and the sight lines are long enough to give plenty of warning of a car or truck. We had come along a trail near the French Creek, one bounded by fields rising east to west. I looked west and thought vaguely that the top of that rise would make good ground for […]
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