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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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