Remember those non-stop grammar lessons in school in which we’d spend long hours pondering whether a particular word was a verb or a noun?

Yes, Sister Grammatica Correcta would drill us on parts of speech; she would use every inch of chalkboard space to diagram sentences, and to be sure, give us enthusiastic students an opportunity to strut our stuff. What fun!

We had a particularly loud end-of-class bell that I prayed would ring. In that school, Immaculate Conception, it was OK to pray — in fact, it was encouraged and often required.

Around the time that the Supreme Court was taking prayers in public schools under consideration, there came a comic strip that showed Archie, Jughead, Veronica, Betty and other classmates on a school-sanctioned ski outing. Somehow, Jughead took a spill on the slopes and landed upside-down, minutes and inches from suffering real injury.

So Jughead got the attention of the sponsor-principal and hollered, “Has the Supreme Court ruled on Prayers in Public Schools?” The principal answered, “I don’t know, Judhead. Why do you ask?” Continue reading →

A few years ago, I wrote a let-me-now-eat-crow column in which I explained having taken credit for a really trivial act. It seems that a local woman, attempting to buy gas at Allsup’s, asked my son, Diego, to hold her place in line at the pumps.

She’d driven up to the wrong side of the pump, and fearing she’d lose her place in line, she asked Diego to order her $4.18 worth of gas. I was already in line at the store, so Diego asked me to do the honors. Noticing the amount was 82 cents short of five dollars, I rounded up the amount. As I left Allsup’s, I saw the grateful woman and admonished her to “help the next person who needs it.” She nodded, thanked me and drove off.

As Diego and I left Allsup’s, my son set the record straight: “Dad, you probably think I paid for her gas; she gave me $4.18, and you put in 82 cents. Stop acting like such a philanthropist.”

Well, he had me there. I’d thought Diego had underwritten most of the purchase and I’d added the extra change. My contribution enabled the woman to drive about 260 feet farther than if I hadn’t put in my share. Continue reading →

“Right-handed people use the left side of their brain, so left-handers are the only people in their right mind.”

Thus read the message on a T-shirt I once owned. I picked it up at a yard sale in Columbia, Mo., in 1974.

Except for dining with members of my wife’s side of the family I don’t pay much attention to my left-handedness, certainly not thinking of it as a handicap — despite what much literature and public opinion say about it.

As for Bonnie’s family, well, her late mother, Velma, her sisters Donna and Beth are all left-handed. That means that when we’d sit down to dine, we needed to choreograph an elaborate dance to place us in such a way that we didn’t bump one another.

When Bonnie’s father, a right-hander, was still with us, and I joined the dinner table, that meant four of the seven of us will have been left-handers, and that kind of proportion is unusual. We represent only 10 percent of the world’s population and 57 percent of those at the dinner table. Continue reading →

Going through my Facebook pages — a routine I follow almost every night — I came across the news that Robin Williams, 63, that comic genius has died; he committed suicide through asphyxiation, the early reports say.

By “came across the news,” I played down the expression. It’s not as if I simply stumbled across that bit of news: It’s all over Facebook, and on virtually every TV channel, and certainly on the next day’s front pages of newspapers.

It hurts. Though I don’t consider myself a hero-worshiper, I feel bad that the world has lost such a person who could make everybody smile. My favorite Robin Williams film was “Mrs. Doubtfire,” about a man on the verge of being divorced who applies and gets hired to become a nanny for his own children.

The elaborate disguise, as an elderly British woman fools even his children. The movie is laced with frantic costume changes wherein he needs to switch from his regular self to the nanny, then back again. Continue reading →

On visits to the Abe Montoya Recreation Center, I easily get my fill of tattoo art. Some patrons enter with a mish-mash of strange, multi-colored drawings on their arms, legs and backs. And as for the men, well they have even more to show off.

The practice of having tattoos applied on one’s body has grown over the years. It used to be that self-applied artwork came from a needle and a bottle of India ink. I recall that even in the ‘50s, when I was in school, some of the students would self-apply tattoos, usually in the shape of a cross, with radiating lines made to look like sun rays.

I drove a school bus to Los Alamos, a village between Sapello and Watrous, when I was in college. On my route I met a student who’d taken the India ink routine a step farther: Not only did my passenger have the customary cross on the hand, but one on the forehead as well.

Tattoos don’t wash off with the next shower, and erasing a tattoo is expensive and, we hear, possibly painful. Continue reading →

How much history is buried in various construction sites, in homes, backyards and under carpets?

It’s interesting to come across information long past, and even overdue. Some news discoveries can be embarrassing.

In 1962, I learned about one such instance while attending a dinner meeting of the Cook County (Ill.) Press Association, in which an editor of one of Chicago’s dailies spoke to us about Chicago journalism history.

The speaker talked about the familiar Teletype machines, those mammoth electric typewriters that print the news without any visible operators. The paper I worked for then had several wire services. By contrast, the Optic, the newspaper I had just left, had only one wire service, and one at a time, variously United Press International or The Associated Press.

The Copley organization for which I worked in the early ‘60s, had about a dozen clattering machines, one just for its own sister newspapers, one for each wire service, a pair of sports wires, and even a Spanish-language wire that piped in news from Mexico and Central and South America. Continue reading →

Whenever Dear Abby gets involved in a discussion about which people feel passionate, you know the matter is serious. Dear Abby (actually Dear Abby’s daughter) took over her mom’s advice column years ago and it remains an extremely popular feature.

But as for feeling passionate, let me explain:

A number of years ago, possibly during the tenure of the original Dear Abby, someone wrote to complain that she had “never been so insulted” in her life. Now does this mean someone questioned her gender? Does it mean someone in a restaurant offended someone else, or did some high school graduate fail to send a thank-you note to the senders of a crisp 20?

Well, dear reader, it was none of these. And the reason I’ve danced around the topic is not because I get paid by the word but because I really believe the offended reader’s question to Dear Abby shouldn’t have even registered on the interest meter.

Here goes anyway: Continue reading →

It’s heartening — but I certainly won’t say humbling — to have received a number of comments on the last few Works of Art, describing observations from countries such as the Czech Republic and Austria, during the two weeks-plus we spent there with family.

“Humbling” is the wrong word. It connotes a feeling of humiliation, as if some of my observations were ridiculous.

But let’s drop the humility and discuss instead the reactions of some people to the articles about Prague and Hallstatt.

Ray Litherland, who, with his wife Joyce, remembers the extremely popular Austrian tourist area of Hallstatt as “a small town with just one main street going through it.” Ray asked me whether anything has changed over the five decades since they visited. Continue reading →

In France, your breakfast waiter invariably will leave you hankering for more. You might just leave the table hungry. And why is that so?

Glad you asked. The custom is supposed to be that the omelet you order at a French cafe will contain only one egg, not two, or even three, as is common in some American restaurants.

The French serve one-egg omelets because in France, “one egg is an ‘oeuf.’” Now does that sound enough like “enough” to explain why diners go hungry?

Back from a 17-day tour with family to the Czech Republic and Austria, I have tales to tell — mostly miscommunications — about experiences in both places. When we eight Trujillo pilgrims chose these sites, I was pleased because Austrians generally speak German, a language I studied back in the olden days, and a great many tourists, I discovered, use French, the language I am studying under the ever-so-patient retired teacher, Lupita Gonzales. Continue reading →

HALLSTATT, Austria — We’re a number of kilometers from the spot I thought we’d be on this day, but the pleasant weather makes us regret nothing at all. As we left Las Vegas for our summer trip overseas, that took us from Albuquerque, to Dallas, to London, then to Prague, in the Czech Republic, I expected to be in Salzburg today, savoring every note Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ever wrote.

But instead, there are often delays and changes in plans. Instead of a concert hall in Salzburg, Austria, where I’d expected to savor ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ and ‘The Magic Flute,’ we’re in a tiny tourist town, Hallstatt, in the middle of the Austrian Alps. I exaggerate only slightly when I say the sun rises around 9 a.m. and sets at 3. And that happens because towering mountains surround every direction from our Bed-and-Breakfast. The lofty peaks and the deep valleys make it almost necessary for dogs in this area to wag their tail vertically. Continue reading →