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A Yankee Notebook: Languages open new windows to the world
10-11-2024 4:05 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

Of all the cultural commentary that floods in here daily on the internet, this little story is one of my favorites. A man standing in a checkout line in a supermarket is talking in a foreign language with someone on his cell phone. The woman standing...


A Yankee Notebook: A few days at sea under fair skies
09-26-2024 1:01 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

Bridget, the young Irish woman who lives in my dashboard, led us unerringly across the glacier-striated grain of New England for almost five hours and popped us out onto Main Street in Rockland, Maine, directly across from our favorite local seafood...


A Yankee Notebook: Sometimes the forces of evil seem all too real
09-18-2024 3:33 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

But ’tis strange; and oftentimes to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence. The instruments of darkness, eh? It’s hard to believe in this scientific age, but lots...


A Yankee Notebook: How summer people move with the seasons
09-12-2024 10:48 AM

By WILLEM LANGE

In the Adirondacks, the summer folks used to arrive by train, along with all their luggage for the summer. Their chauffeurs, who’d driven the family cars up from New York or New Haven, met them at the station to ferry them to their cottages (the men...


A Yankee Notebook: Giving labor unions their due
09-05-2024 2:28 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

Syracuse, N.Y., in the mid-1950s; a steamy Friday mid-afternoon in July. I had just climbed up for a water break from the manhole I was digging beneath the pavement when a little brown man approached — brown suit, brown shirt and tie, tobacco-brown...


A Yankee Notebook: What is the ‘home of the brave’ so afraid of?
09-03-2024 11:36 AM

By WILLEM LANGE

Reading and listening to the news as I do, and remembering my classes in American history (the best of which was taught by a delightful Englishman who still wore his Oxford varsity crew sweater), I can’t help but wonder if the United States is a...


A Yankee Notebook: A day’s work and its many wages
08-21-2024 2:35 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

I once had a friend (now long gone to his reward) who seemed to take offense at the tag line I used in my radio commentaries. When I started out in radio, I was searching for a consistent way to end my weekly few minutes. “Why don’t you just use the...


A Yankee Notebook: In praise of civil discourse
08-21-2024 2:31 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

With only about twelve weeks left in the current presidential campaign, we’ve entered what I call the nyah-nyah phase: the fourth-grade-level taunting about personal characteristics, idiosyncrasies, and each candidate’s past missteps. Almost none of...


A Yankee Notebook: Cities are becoming as barren as anthills
08-08-2024 12:36 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

During the epic Southwestern drought of the 1950s (my boss, a retired Presbyterian minister turned rancher, declared it Biblical), I spent a few months in the central Texas Permian Basin as a ranch hand. It was a whole new world to me. Everything, it...


A Yankee Notebook: Sympathy smooths over a bad week
08-01-2024 2:27 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

So foul and fair a week I have not seen. It seems appropriate to paraphrase Macbeth talking about the weather and current events as he welcomes King Duncan (soon to be the late King Duncan) to his castle. He’d just had that kind of day, and was about...


A Yankee Notebook: President Biden's action isn't unprecedented
07-31-2024 8:59 AM

By WILLEM LANGE

The claim by CNN that the presidential debate of June 27 would be “historic” turned out to be right on the money, but hardly for the reason they expected. As the curtain mercifully dropped on the scene, my friend Bea turned toward me and said — well,...


A Yankee Notebook: New experiences are great, mostly
07-18-2024 12:43 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

For some decades I’ve tried to do something new each week: something I’ve never done before; something I haven’t done for a long time; or something I never thought I’d do again. I’m not always successful; and the something, whatever it is, isn’t...


A Yankee Notebook: We’re focusing on the wrong half of the debate
07-11-2024 11:10 AM

By WILLEM LANGE

I talk back to the television quite a bit. I get away with it; there’s nobody here but Kiki to comment on either my behavior or my performance. My wife used to point out, sometimes none too gently if I was commenting upon an especially egregious line...


A Yankee Notebook: Finding the words for our current state
07-03-2024 2:54 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

I’ve been listening to sermons for over eight decades. At first, of course, it was because I had to. Next, because it was the thing to do. Now, occasionally, because I want to. And I must say that over those more than 80 years I’ve heard a few good...


A Yankee Notebook: Freedom from religion is fundamental
06-28-2024 3:59 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

The great state of Louisiana, not content with labeling mifeprestone a dangerous controlled substance, has, in a move stunning for its chutzpah, just launched an attempt to vault its government backward between 1,300 and 3,000 years, depending upon...


A Yankee Notebook: Lunch brings on a bout of indignation
06-21-2024 5:46 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

It’s just past lunchtime up here on the little hill, and I’m feeling extremely grumpy. This is not my usual post-lunch mood. Normally I’d collapse into my recliner, wait for Kiki to jump up into my lap and turn around till she found a spot, and begin...


A Yankee Notebook: Kids absorb the outdoors
06-12-2024 10:28 AM

By WILLEM LANGE

We started the kids out early, Mother and I. From summers working on an island and living in a wall tent off the coast of Maine, and little weekend outings, we progressed to a trip down the Allagash when the oldest, Virginia, was 11 and the youngest,...


A Yankee Notebook: A dog is a friend, but a terrier looks after you
06-04-2024 4:16 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

If we start down the driveway in late afternoon, Kiki knows it’s either getting the mail or going to the park. If I pass by the mailbox, she knows her dream is coming true, and climbs partway over the barrier that’s supposed to keep her in the back...


A Yankee Notebook: A message from inside the Arctic Circle
05-29-2024 2:26 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

Twenty-four hours of daylight starts tomorrow! That notice popped up on my Facebook page recently. It was posted by my dear friend Larry Whittaker in the Inuit village of Kugluktuk at 67.8º N, 115.1º W, on the shore beside the Northwest Passage at the...


A Yankee Notebook: A life of hope leads to a time of anticipation
05-24-2024 2:19 PM

By WILLEM LANGE

When my wife and I were married, back in 1959, our prospects were so grim that the priest to whom we went for our church-mandated counseling gave our union — “frankly,” he said — a one-in-10 chance of survival. She went to work in an S&H Green Stamp...

Displaying articles 41 to 60 out of 78 total.
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