Personal Carl Sandburg writes that Abe Lincoln, in his law office in Springfield, kept an envelope marked, "If you can't find it anywhere else, look here." Everyone should have such an envelope. This is mine
Left Behind
Most of my adult life I've been on what is called, in our degraded political language, "the left." Now, I don't know what I am.
Triskelion
I wasn't to follow the threads of this, only to see and feel the impact and the connection, right then and there. It was there and it was clear
Kids' Menu
I suppose if it weren't for social pressure, nobody would ever grow up. Why would they? And some people in fact don't grow up. We either laud them as artists or lock them up
European Vacation
Summer of 2003, we did the Keys. Fall of 2004, Luke and I attempt to further damage the relationship between Old Europe and the New World
Luke's Page
Hi this is me Luke I just want to talk for a minute. Few people know about marine biology but it is realy neat. there are so many unexplored places under the sparkeling surface of the water that it is almost spine tingeling I just can't explain it
Ground Zero
Down each street, past the portable generators and emergency vehicles, through the reek of smoke and steam, we saw a sliver of what I've seen in hundreds of photo wire images: wilted girders drooping from a broken foundation; the black box of a ruined building, with its banks of windows like gaping dead men's mouths. Compared to the clean, hard-lined, glass-and-steel boxes of skyscrapers, the wrecked buildings looked organic; like melted candles or rotting chunks of flesh
Where I'm Writing From
Lancaster County looks down on Lancaster City, and Lancaster City looks down on "the ward," and that's where I live
Besuch in Berlin
The Berlin I lived in is gone now, I am sure. It's only been 20 years since I was last there, but the place I rode out of is sure to be as deep-buried in history as ante-bellum Atlanta
Genealogy
Some of it is my family history, much of it is not. But all of it centers on parts of America from which thousands, if not millions, of people trace their descent. And I haven't seen this information elsewhere on the web
Book Excerpt
A sample chapter from "West Chester to 1865: 'That Elegant & Notorious Place,' " published in 1999 by Chester County Historical Society
The Last Farmer
A small town newspaper editor has to accept old folks in the community stopping by his office to tell stories. Most of the editors I worked for felt they had better things to do, but I liked it. Hemingway, who knew everything about journalism, once said something like, "no matter how busy he really is, a journalist should always act like he has nothing to do"
High Enough to See the World
We made leaf forts and tree forts. We caught a collective madness for three weeks and dug for oil, in the cornfield, and when we gave that up the Rogers kids enlisted all of us to steal plywood from the building sites and we made the world's best tree fort
Miscarriage
Shortly after we married, we learned my wife was pregnant. We told our families, we looked up the meanings of boys' and girls' names, we talked of childhood experiences we wanted to share with our own kid. We even bought a few simple, genderless toys. And we enrolled, through the HMO at the paper where I worked, in a pre-baby program for first-time parents
My Secret Life
As revealed by a Google search of my name
My Verse
I don't write it anymore. But I haven't quite burned it all, either. Here's what survived of a misguided attempt to be a poet
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