Still Learning How to Fly

“And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes…

Improbably somehow, around second grade, I acquired a fistful of paper bills, play-pretend money. I don’t know why or where.  Mother and Daddy would never have purchased anything so inconsequential or commercial.  I didn’t filch…

Sometime before I turned four, Mother made my first doll:  in the parlance of 1950, a pickaninny.  She’s a foot tall with a nine-inch reach, constructed in almost Flat-Stanley dimension, her red-brown evenly loomed skin…

Here on this sun-dappled summer highway, I tally for myself the dreams I’ve left behind. The ones outmoded by age and circumstance.  The ones that were always more fantasy than prospect: A sturdy bungalow; An…

Really Dave’s idea of great date involved our basement and pizza delivery.  No formalities, no suffering through new waitresses or the fry cook learning his trade.  None of the unease involved when two people with…

Not half so important as we’ve made them now, the holidays of my growing up were still bookmarks, distinct cross-sections in our daily lives. All Schools Day and the May Fete Begun in 1914, All…

It wasn’t exactly my idea, that trip to Dulles Airport on a rainy fall evening. Merilee invited it. Supplied the schedule. Wanted Ben to find a friend in Washington—some collegial ally– while she wrestled with…

What parents encourage their sheltered 20-year-old Kansas daughter to leave home, fly to Washington D. C., and become a human guinea pig?   Paul and Esther Sherfy, that’s who.  Among other frightfully respectable, thoughtful Church of…

On Saturday, June 24, 1967, one of a car full of National Institutes of Health college-student guinea pigs, I visited Gettysburg National Military Park for the first time.   I can’t remember what my friends…