By Wayne Allensworth Piles of old magazines, Drawers of boy’s letters And the line of love They must have ended somewhere. Yesterday’s Tribune is gone Along with youth — Ernest Hemingway Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, wrote Wordsworth. But to be young was very heaven. Part of what the poet penned as an “autobiographical poem,” those lines would linger in his heart and mind...
By Wayne Allensworth For nearly 40 years, your humble observer’s life has been connected in one way or another with Russia, or, better still, the Russian world, that broad cultural expanse that extends across much of Eurasia. And from the beginning of that journey, what drew me in as much as anything about Russia and the Russians were that country’s impressive cultural achievements. A tragic...
By Wayne Allensworth The old gentleman had told me that he was very grateful. Grateful to God for all the blessings he had experienced in his long and eventful life. Grateful for the friends he had made, and grateful for his family. I had sat across from him and watched his eyes soften and then twinkle a bit. He was pale and declining, but for a moment he almost seemed hale and if not hearty, at...
By Wayne Allensworth The ghosts of Christmases past are still very much with us. I’m quite thankful they are, for those “ghosts” remind us of a time that was less sterile and less fragmented. So, it’s no surprise that the proponents of “progress” have made war on those ghosts and on that particular holiday. Tom Piatak has done great service in his efforts to note and counter what...
By Wayne Allensworth I had to be careful. The ornaments were wrapped, each one in tissue paper and some of them were very old. I had dropped a couple of them and they shattered. As brittle as dried leaves. Their skins had grown thin as they had grown old. Christmas ornaments collected by my mother over time. So many Santa Claus ornaments, old St. Nick in his jolliest attire, thick beard and...
By Wayne Allensworth On Veteran’s Day, Tom Piatak reminded us of some veterans who will never be thanked for their service, men who, after heroically performing their duty on the U.S.S. Liberty, have been all but forgotten. None of the hawkish GOP presidential candidates, much less any Democrats, will ever ask for a moment of silence for the men lost, and none have or ever will demand that their...
By Wayne Allensworth I was taking a walk on a cool morning. Fall had finally arrived after a blistering summer. Live oak limbs made a canopy over the path, and their long shadows trailed across me, with little breaks between the limbs where the smoky autumn sun shined through. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a butterfly’s shadow tracing its way through the limbs, and I looked up and...
By Wayne Allensworth I was strolling around the campus of a major state university not so many years ago. Along the way, I committed what has become a cardinal sin in our brave new globalized world—I noticed something that stood out like a man in a three-piece suit in a 21st century supermarket. What I noticed was that the student body didn’t look very American. I saw lots of representatives of...
By Wayne Allensworth Over the Rainbow…Everybody remembers Judy Garland singing that lovely song in The Wizard of Oz. The song was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg specifically for Judy to sing in the movie. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. After Toto snaps at Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), Judy as Dorothy wonders if there is any place where there is no trouble. There must...
By Wayne Allensworth Gretchen Peters is another fine musician you may not have heard of. Born in New York City in 1957, Gretchen Peters found her way to Nashville in 1988 after living in Boulder Colorado in the 1970s, where she had played in local clubs. She has written songs that became hits for country stars such as Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, and George Strait, as...
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