A Word Aptly Spoken

I’ve written posts about how you don’t know what you don’t know.  We all have blind spots, spots where our knowledge is incomplete, incorrect, or not there at all.  I’ve also written about how I am reluctant to read books that have been so highly praised and reviewed that I’m just sure they will fall […]

“Friends come and friends go,    but a true friend sticks by you like family.” The quote comes from Proverbs chapter 18, verse 24 in The Message translation of the Bible. It has been the experience of my life and I imagine yours too. Everyone knows that friendship is a good thing, a big part of a […]

I like learning things.  I go out and research things to find facts and details.  I just did a little research using the area Americans tend to value above all else – sports.  Based on the information I got from WorldAtlas.com, here are the top six  largest stadiums in the United States.  First in size […]

Some equate being a good reader with being a fast reader.  I am a good reader – I comprehend and retain (to use educational terminology).  I am not, however, a fast reader.  I used to wish that I could read faster, but I don’t any longer. As a student, reading slowly is not exactly a […]

It’s a feeling that starts as an emptiness in the pit of the stomach.  Beginning as a niggling feeling that things are not right, it foretells something ominous approaching, or to steal a phrase, that something wicked this way comes.  The hollow spot grows and, as it grows, the emptiness spreads from there to my […]

I am currently reading Caring for Words in a Culture of LIes by Marilyn McEnyre (W. B. Erdmans Publishing Co, 2009). I am about a third of the way through it and I am absolutely floored by it! I know I’ll be writing more about it both here and elsewhere later because it has challenged […]

As we face the Christmas season here in the midst of a pandemic, we do so having learned through Thanksgiving about human nature and the willingness to alter traditions for the greater good.  And what we learned is that people are bullheaded and beyond resistant to change no matter how dire the need to do […]

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.;”  John Greenleaf Whittier I remember reading this quote years ago.  I tried to take heed to these words because they rang true to me.  Now as I’m working my way around the sun for the sixty-something time, they are […]

Going through high school and college at the end of the 1960’s and the first half of the 1970’s, I had been told over and over how highly ranked my high school was and had complete confidence in my college English department to give their majors a firm foundation in literature.  And they did – […]

I am a lover of biographies, memoirs, and autobiographies.  I like to get to know interesting people in depth, see how they tick, learn what led them to the achievements in their lives.  I’ve always enjoyed a well-written biography of historical figures.  Not those ones we read in elementary school that were nothing more than […]