The Handshake At The End

                

By Eric Le Roy

  

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Sometimes a death in the family comes like grief poured over your head, a bucketful of black water. You can drown that way. Sometimes it feels like liberation. Often, it’s more of a handshake. That’s how it was with my Dad and me.

Earlier this week, a friend told me that his mother had passed. She was 93. My friend has also been subjected Read the rest

Europe Today: Inept, Embarrassing, Pathetic

By Eric Le Roy

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   When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.

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But … Read the rest

Noon To Noir

By Eric Le Roy

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Content 18+ As we study history together, I often show documentary films to my students. When these films are about the distant past, there is a voice (or person-moderator) who walks us through the information, using whatever illustrations can be mustered. But as we get nearer to modern times the documentaries come to life: actual human action in black and white. From the late 19th … Read the rest

Two Saints: Paul and Augustine, 1967

Content 21+ It was my first plane ride, and the stewardesses had no choice but to be beautiful back in those days; it was part of the job. Even now, I can see the reason. It was to inspire confidence. Aviation was not as safe then as it supposedly is now. I have never looked at the statistics, but I do know — from my grandfather’s own account — that … Read the rest