Category: Family

Brothers

They say when my parents arrived home from the hospital with me that my brother who had been at home with the live-in housekeeper/nannie greeted me at the door with a baseball glove and a baseball because he had been told that I was to be his companion, someone to play baseball with. My wife

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The gang’s all here…

…hard to tell you how it feels to have the brood around the table/in the house/slipping in and out for three days. Old grandparents like myself perhaps understand it best, wondering how the years got by us and turned these little people into real adults with ideas and opinions that aren’t the first derivative of

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Research – where you find it

My daughter wrote: “Based on my observations of many and conversations with handfuls, a large number of scientists are not naturally inclined to network.”  I’m trying to teach Marketing Research this fall (for the first time in probably 25 years), and I love the texture of this statement about observation and inference. (The classic statement

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Merry Christmas to all…

and to all a good night! All the best from the Bristol Ed Strongs….

Katrina post

I booted up an old Fujitsu tablet computer today that hadn’t been used for over three years and on the desktop was the text of an email that I sent to family and friends in September of 2005 following my first trip back to New Orleans after we evacuated for Katrina. The photos referred to

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Skeeball Wizard

Laurie took three tokens worth of practice Sunday night at the carnival on the town common. The crowd swirling around included the usual town suspects, clouds of teenage girls, swaggers of teenage boys, mothers struggling with strollers in the grass criss-crossed with electrical cables overlain with rubber doormats. Last night we went back to the

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Contemplation of the simpler life

On Walden Pond Addie took this and we all enjoyed it. A Columbus Day weekend trip to search out fall foliage ended up with us picnicing alongside the location of Henry David Thoreau’s hootch on Walden Pond. Literally, I could spit and hit the hearthstone from where we are seated. So…bread, cheese (no wine…not allowed

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Eccentricity

Maurice Webster was my father’s mother’s brother. An achitect who played chess at the open-air chess boards in Chicago. He rolled his own cigarettes from a pouch of Bull Durham, a process that fascinated small children. Once, when he was visiting Beloit to look after a building project on the college campus, I saw him

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Hey, Mr. Balloon man…

Having posted the photo of my mother taken in 1917 or so, it’s not totally out of place to insert this one here. I’ve Photoshopped it for the sepia look, because the color of the original makes it obvious that it’s not a true period photo. It’s actually me at 17 (June, 1958) with the balloons. The occasion

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Adeline Carpenter Salmon

Yesterday morning my sister Anne called, something she never does. Mother had died during the night. She had lived in a nursing home for two years, crippled by a broken hip and arthritic joints, unable to get about except by wheelchair and specially-equipped vans. But she had been travelling for some weeks, visiting friends and

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