TagMemories

The End of Men Part II

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 Sexual Economics and the Technological/Social Nexus By Wayne Allensworth My paternal grandfather was a boilermaker. When I was a boy, he made his living working with an oxy-acetylene gas torch, used to cut through steel plates, and an arc welder, used in fabricating the boilers, pipes, and other objects manufactured at the plant where he worked in Houston, Texas. He had learned his trade...

The Trophy (An Essay on Ritual and Understanding)

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By Wayne Allensworth The trophy hangs in my office nowadays. When I was a boy at home, for a time it faced my bed. The black centered eyes gazed at me at night, the head looking wise somehow. The thick neck. The “points” of its wide antlers. The ears seemingly on alert. It had hung in our kitchen when I was very young, just over the kitchen table. The kitchen was small, as was the...

Texas Memories on Independence Day

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by Wayne Allensworth March and April are special months for true Texans. March 2 is Texas Independence Day. March 6 is Alamo Day. And April 21 marks Sam Houston’s victory over Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. Being a Texan has always been the bedrock of my identity. I’m an American because I’m a Texan. And my boyhood memories are full of Texas Independence Day commemorations...

Ordinary People (Past and Present) 

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By Wayne Allensworth I was looking through my late father’s personal effects recently and ran across a letter. It wasn’t just any letter, but one he had kept from among his late brother Harold’s belongings. A gunner on a B-24, he died on D-Day in World War II. It was from a young lady named Virginia in his hometown of Houston, Texas. Harold went through training in San Antonio and was...

Today’s Generation Gap Is Not The Fault Of The Young

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By Wayne Allensworth You baby boomers out there will remember the “generation gap” of the 1960’s-70’s, that invisible psychological barrier between many, but far from all, parents and grandparents and what was called “the younger generation.” We had what was known at the time as “a failure to communicate.” Whether it was race, religion, Vietnam, the role of the state, religion, or, most of all...

Along with Youth (A Retrospective)

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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...

Abbott Says He Will Defy Court Ruling. But Will He Stick To His Guns?

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By Wayne Allensworth From Fox News:  Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is pushing back and adding more razor wire to the border fence after Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that the border patrol can remove the wire along the southern border. So far, the border patrol in the borderland has not cut down any of the razor wire. In the meantime, Abbott says he won’t back down despite the Supreme Court’s...

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

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By Wayne Allensworth Rolf spent much of his boyhood in wartime, one in which piles of rubble accumulated as the Allied bombers leveled his city. Rolf and his friends played in the piles of rubble, and later joined the exodus of Germans heading West as the Red Army approached from the East. Everyone knew what would come under the Soviet thumb. So, they packed their belongings and made the trek in...

Happiness

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 Do we pursue the wrong kind of “happiness”? By Wayne Allensworth The “pursuit of happiness” seems to be a quest everyone in our society is on. It takes on the aura of a requirement in an age of radical individualism, in which “self-realization” is supposed to be the aim of life in an otherwise meaningless universe. But how does one “pursue” happiness? And, most of all, what is it? As has...

Gratitude

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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...

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