I’m old enough to remember, not fondly, mustard plasters applied to my chest during my childhood bouts with the “croup,” and Vicks Vapo-Rub spread beneath a warm humidifier to help keep my perpetually clogged sinuses clear. So I was filled with a kind of warped nostalgia when someone gave me a little booklet at the […]
In ‘Class’ — at Home
Posted February 16th, 2012 at 2:23 pm (UTC-4)
This week, the Virginia General Assembly agreed to consider and later vote on a bill that would allow some students who had been barred from playing high-school sports to compete on the school teams. These kids are not lawbreakers, academically inferior, or lousy athletes. In fact, they’re among the best and brightest, and in some […]
Depression Ethic
Posted February 10th, 2012 at 7:28 pm (UTC-4)
I’m a Tweener. Not an 11- or 12-year-old between childhood and teenage years, certainly, but a child of what’s been called “The Smallest Generation,” born during World War II between the Depression-era “Greatest Generation” and the postwar “Baby Boomer” generation. We war-baby Tweeners would have had to be pretty precocious to know about the war […]
The Harlem of the South
Posted February 9th, 2012 at 10:24 am (UTC-4)
In the years immediately following the American Civil War of the 1860s, thousands of African Americans, including both former southern slaves and northern soldiers, moved into a lively neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, the capital city of the defeated Confederate States. The neighborhood became known as Jackson Ward locally, and to blacks across the American East […]
Man Caves and Woman Caves
Posted February 3rd, 2012 at 8:19 pm (UTC-4)
I sort of hope you’re reading this before the big Super Bowl American football game on Sunday — an undeclared holiday in millions of U.S. households. But the points I’ll make hold, even after the game. There’s a sports-talk host whose work I like and follow, both on local radio in Washington and on his […]
