Stories on Modern Cosmopolitanism
Earlier this month, the curtain fell on a man of irreplicable passion, small snippets of wisdom, and love for humanity. Gerry Dionne, a man I’ve known for the better part of two decades, played out his swan song on December 4, 2021. Gerry, the father of my friend JR, was always a bit culturally aloof in our small conservative town in suburban North Carolina. Here was this elder New England…
A reimagining of Stefan Zweig s World of Yesterday Despite the propriety and the modesty of this view of life, there was a grave and dangerous arrogance in this touching confidence that we had barricaded ourselves to the last loophole against any possible invasion of fate. In its liberal idealism, the pre-COVID world was honestly convinced that it was on the straight and unfailing path towards…
Today I received a work email from someone who said he had vital info. I dialed him back with intrigue. It turns out he s an older gentleman living in Florida who had some thoughts on the COVID vaccine. He needed someone to hear him out. Luckily for me, he said he also moonlights for the FBI and DEA and has been witness to shenanigans of a high order. Let the fun begin, I thought. To tell that…
Despite my best efforts to break free, my body remained chained to the bed. All I could muster was a muffled screech pleading to be woken. Infinite shapes and forms of colorful figures skimmed my chest, subtly applying pressure to my muscles with every sweep. Every move of the dark figures floating around my body was choreographed and narrated via an omnipresent loudspeaker somewhere behind me.…
It must have been the fall of 1955. After two years of me fighting it off, my parents had succeeded in enrolling me into catechism classes at Our Lady of Whatever-It-Was Catholic Church, roughly 5 miles from home in Hampton, New Hampshire. If you’ve grown up in some other religious tradition, you may want to know that catechism is much like Sunday school, only a little more formal, and because of…
On the streets where I learned to drive in Concord, a quiet suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, I often broke the speed limit on Warren C. Coleman Boulevard. I never gave much thought to the name, and always figured he was a former mayor or governor of some renown with his own winding highway. When curiosity got the better of me, I learned that Mr. Coleman was no politician. He was a serial…
My latest moments of pride rest exclusively on seeing our daughter grow and develop into her own person. She doesn’t know all the negativity of our COVID reality, the canceled vacation plans to see family in North Carolina, or the dark specters of doom that fill our newsfeeds every day. She knows happiness, eating with mama and papa, bathtime, riding her red scooter bike, and staring at fluttering…
My friends are falling apart. This one is having open-heart surgery. A couple have diabetes. Another is noticing vision deterioration; and all of us have some hearing loss. Hearing what? Yes, I’m fine; thanks for asking. And then there are those abrupt pauses in the conversation while we collectively try to remember a name we all know like the back of our whachucallit. We’re in phase three of the…
The Weissenhof Estate – an early exemplar of modernist architecture – is striking in its banality. An aimless wanderer in Stuttgart’s gently terraced northern suburbs may be unaware she has stumbled across a UNESCO World Heritage site were it not for a discreetly hung plaque. To the untrained eye, the dozen or so white, cube-like structures built by leading architects in 1927 under the aegis of…
It’s quarter to midnight for the cigarette I burn and pure dawn of a psychedelic, Sunday-like Tuesday unfolding on empty scaffolds around half-buildings downtown for which construction is suspended until life resumes tomorrow with the gut-filled, drunk, and happy souls returning to the mundaneness of their work. Work that doesn’t end, ever, but keeps on going and keeps time going on in one general…
