When one has lost someone Should you stay In one place And wait for what will seem to be Hours without end eyes turn the head in impatient anticipation for them to find you Or should you go looking Turning down one way And then another Wondering if In your quest to find them You have missed them again As you went right And they left Wilson/07

Since it is going to be Thanksgiving, I thought I would leave a blog appropriate to the occasion. As you who have read my previous articles know, my family had several people on the Mayflower. Most of them lived to attend that first Thanksgiving. They are: Thomas Rogers, John Bundy, Anna Churchman, Walter Deane, John Gilbert, John Howland, John Rogers, John Stong, Samuell Williams, Sarah Williams, and Thomas Williams. Two of them, Thomas Rogers, and Thomas Williams even signed that famous document, The Mayflower Compact along with Miles Standish and John Alden on November 11, 1620. They weren’t...

There was a time when it must have been incredibly difficult to understand anything you read because there was absolutely no punctuation in existence and nobody used capital letters either so that all the words just followed one after the other and the only way you could understand them was to put in the effort to try and figure out just what the writer was trying to say so you could make some sense out of that long string of letters in front of you. See what I mean? Without punctuation, writing is…well…pointless. That’s right; punctuation is a fairly new invention. Well, that’s...

As you all know, I love language. That’s why I belong to the Grammar Police. And loving language as I do, I love…well words. And, as sick as it sounds, I spend some time pouring over dictionaries just to look at the origin of words. No, I’m not insane. And yes, I DO have a life. It just so happens to be a life that includes looking at the origins of words, okay? So, anyway, the origin of most words makes perfect sense. Take for example, the charming little word “redundant”. We all know what it means. It means to repeat yourself. This is from your Department of Redundancy...

The last time we went to Ireland, we spent a day taking a bus-tour of the Wicklow Mountains (such as they are. North Americans have to laugh a little at what the Irish call “mountains”.). We went through the village of Avoca where the BBC series, Ballykissangel was filmed, and then to the ancient monastic village established by Saint Kevin back in 540 CE called Glendaloch. The Village gets its name from the twin lakes less than a mile or so down the road from the village. Glendaloch is Gaelic for “two lakes”. The buildings there are simple, stone buildings, built to withstand the...

It hadn’t been an exceptionally long war. We had only been involved a little over a year. Since April of 1917, our forces had been fighting in the trenches in France, and now on November 11, 1918, the guns stopped and the killing was over. Still, in that short amount of time, we lost nearly 117,000 brave Americans. They told us it was the war to end all wars and the country was mighty happy to see it end. Our American sons had fought to make the world safe for democracy. But, as in most wars, democracy had nothing to do with it. It seems to be a peculiar disease among mortal humankind...

My wife and I went to a wedding on Saturday. The daughter of one of our best friends got married. We’ve known the bride ever since she was a baby. I can remember her when her mother held her in her arms. We have watcher her grow from a babe to a beautiful young…well…babe. And now, we watched her make the most important commitment of her life. One of our other best friends, an Irish Priest, came all the way from Ireland to perform the ceremony. It was just beautiful. But all this folksy crap has nothing to do with anything except that we went to a wedding. Whenever I go to a...