This year for Veterans Day instead of my usual post on the history and meaning of the observation the World War I Armistice on November 11, 1918 I thought I would resurrect an old chestnut that I first read as a Chalice Lighting to open services at the old Congregational Unitarian Congregation in Woodstock, Illinois about 2000.   I read it subsequently when the congregation movedand was renamed the Tree of Life UU Congregation in McHenry.   It was included in my 2004 Skinner House collection, We Build Temples in the Heart. It was based on the memories of a boy from Cheyenne in the 1950s.   Reviewing it now, I am struck that the World War II is fast fading away.   In not too many years the last of them will gone, just as I remember...

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.   Out on the edge you see all kind of things you can’t see from the center.” —Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut was born on Armistice Day, November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He would go on to become a veteran of another warand the experience shaped him as a human being—one of the great iconoclasts of his time, and a confirmed pacifist. His death on April 11, 2007 at the age of 84 was, as he predicted, not an emphatic period at the end of a long life, but a mere semi-colon (he despised semi-colons.)   He died of a brain injury sustained after slipping and falling in his Manhattanapartment several days earlier.   It was the kind of comic, anti-heroic departur...

During a lull in the post-attack chaos in Paris a stunned survivor surveys the carnage. Note— Six years ago on unlucky Friday the 13th the terrorist attack on Paris nightspots teeming with attractive young people including those getting down to a loud American death metal band both shocked the world and set off a controversy over the relative worth of some victims vs. those from swarthier or more remote parts of the world and internet bickering over the propriety of selective grief.  On the next Sunday I scribbled a poem before church services which I read to semi-stunned silence.  This is the post I put up reflecting on the terror, telling that story, and, of course, the poem. Coordinated ISIS shootings and bomb blasts left 130 peop...

  Civilian pilot Eugene Burton Ely at the controls of his Curtis bi-plane. He had been flying for about six months. When a young, self-taught pilotnamed Eugene Burton Ely left the deckof the U.S. Navy cruiser USS Birmingham in a primitive stick, bailing wire, and canvas winged Curtis pusher biplane on November 14, 1910 he barely escaped with his life and his aircraft intact but raised the curtain on naval aviation . Ely, a 24 year-old Midwesterner from Iowa, may seem like an unlikely aviator.   But in those early days of aviation, he was not untypical of the kind of daydreaming tinkerers and speed enthusiasts who were drawn to the new opportunities in the sky. He was born in the farming community of Williamsburg, Iowaon October 21, 18...