It was as if the President had been shot and killed in downtown Gallup. The commotion, the panic, the floods of tears, the anger and confusion must have rained on every community in the nation. Yes, it was as if . . .

Let me explain:

Virtually every living U.S. senior citizen can recall precisely where each was and what each was doing the day President Kennedy was assassinated. The just-published Friday edition of the Optic, for example, compiled reactions from people who remember the event clearly.

A local, Bruce Wertz, furnished us his copy of the Optic’s front page for that date.

Let me explain what it was like in 1963, in the pre-Google, pre-Facebook, pre-cell phone, pre-computer era when things moved much slower. One of my duties was to cover the McKinley County courthouse. I’d sit in on trials, pick up daily records such as divorces, marriage licenses, liens and lawsuits and whatever else went on in the county seat. Continue reading →

We were leaving a high school play that I had directed, “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson. It was exactly this time of year, and the weather conditions were identical to what’s happening tonight: chimneys blowing over, fences being uprooted, animals shivering.

As I was leaving the school, I saw the wife of one of my fellow teachers at Cuba High School make a dash that would have been the envy of our football coach at the time. But instead of a pigskin, Ida was carrying a child in her arms. She might also have been carrying a baby the other way, but I noticed only the child, about 2 years old.

She’d made sure her husband prewarmed the car and unlocked it for her 20-yard sprint: she didn’t want the child to inhale one molecule of that beastly cold night air, and she’d insisted that the interior of their car be roasting for her arrival with babe in arms. By the time they got home, minutes later, they went through the same ritual: make sure the home furnace is roaring, and have six dozen blankets at the ready when she enters the house. Continue reading →

Ah, jeez, some people can be so nice. Please don’t overlook the irony to that statement. “Can be so nice” is almost like saying, “You’re so much help!”

I’ve gone over these expressions, orally, a dozen times, and there’s no way I can make them seem sincere. In my experience “So much help” always comes out sarcastically, regardless of who’s uttering it.

Now that we’re experts on irony, let’s get to the point:

My son, Stan, sent me a Facebook item, that reads “It is better to run over a bicyclest then get in a head on accedent because they don’t share the road.” The message appears on a sign next to a highway. The Facebook post doesn’t specify a location.

Now that’s the writing of a nice guy. Even the thought of injuring or killing a bicyclist (compare my spelling of this word with his) is abhorrent. Often we read about someone who ran a bicyclist off the road and drove off. Continue reading →

The aphorism, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” has an interesting pedigree, variously credited to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a 12th century cleric, and to Virgil’s Aeneid written shortly before the time of Christ, and whose translation reads, “It’s easy to go to hell.”

Those notions certainly apply to the three men who are likely to be facing felony charges for toppling over a huge rock in Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. The unusual formations date back to the Jurassic era.Ã¥

The three are David Hall, Glenn Taylor and his son, all Boy Scout leaders, who used a twisted bit of logic and rationalization in modifying the position of a 200-million-year-old rock at that park.

It’s inconceivable that the three would struggle so tenaciously to tip over a massive rock. The park contains many unusually shaped mounds that officials say look like goblins. Remember, now, the ostensible reason for the Scout leaders’ vandalism was to protect others who, after all, could be crushed should the rock tumble. So exhilarated were the three that they videotaped their efforts and spend lots of time high-fiving one another over their accomplishment. Continue reading →

Tomorrow night, many of us may get the opportunity to become frightened — and to enjoy it. Is it the rush of adrenalin that gives people a “high”?

Thursday night, Halloween, will of course feature spooky costumes as kids go trick-or-treating. If history holds out, they’ll congregate mostly in the newer, better-lighted areas of town. Streets like Vegas Drive, Mountain View, Dalbey and Lee drives are likely gathering places.

Along with the door-knocking comes a host of scary Stephen King movies or those of the Friday the 13th vintage, the super-slasher flicks.

All that makes one wonder: Why do people enjoy being scared?

The final speech class before Halloween usually was devoted entirely to the notion of being frightened. My speech class, last decade, featured several prepared speeches delivered by a few students who seemed convinced of the dangers facing trick-or-treaters. Continue reading →

A columnist I admired in my early days in journalism was Hal Boyle, who wrote about 7,000 newspaper columns during a long career. He died in 1974 at the age of 64.

Though he reported from the front lines during World War II, he didn’t limit his topics to war stories: Everything was fair game for the Associated Press writer, who often opened with, “Things a columnist wouldn’t know if he didn’t open his mail.”

Can we apply that to today’s mail? Well yes, if you want to learn about credit card offers or solicitations for funds from a zillion charities. A close friend once told me that giving to a charity is “like feeding pigeons.”

Let me explain: When I was an editorial assistant for a weekly newspaper called the Naperville (Ill.) Sun, I’d walk through a huge park on the way to work each morning. Once I must have dropped part of my breakfast roll, whereupon a couple of pigeons joined in the cleanup duties. I shared some more, and over several days, the word must have gotten around, and soon I feared I’d become like one of the statues in the park, a place for pigeons to leave their constant droppings. Continue reading →

At Highlands University in the ‘80s, a secretary I used to know circulated a sheet that contained clever descriptions of the college hierarchy.

It started with the dean, who was “able to leap tall buildings at a single bound” and was “more powerful than a locomotive.”

The department head could leap Quonset huts and sometimes win a tug-of-war with a switch engine.

The full professor left scuff marks trying to leap over a chair. The lowly instructor would trip over his own shoes.

The events and descriptions are probably inaccurate and based on memories. I hope some Highlands secretary, with access to the correct version, will forward it to the Optic. Continue reading →

No, this is not a repeated column. It’s not a summer (or early fall) rerun; however, you might recall I’ve asked the question before and touched on the subject: When we suddenly become aware of word or combination of words, is its usage new, or did we just now become aware of it?

During political seasons, we overdose on “convoluted,” usually in the context of “The provisions of Obamacare are too frigging convoluted.” They mean, I surmise, “confusing,” but the meaning of convoluted comes closer to intricate, repetitious.

And the word “conflate,” to mix, blend, combine, usually arguments and issues, gets plenty of play by the fine folks in Washington, who brought us the Shutdown.

As a grammar purist, I can overlook conflate and convolute; I still struggle with the pass that the incorrect use of “hopefully” received into the once-pristine English language. The word’s been around forever, and it’s obviously one of those that make us wonder whether it suddenly emerged and we all began to use it. Continue reading →

For years I’ve read about the old school marms, usually found in Dickensian novels, whose only way of passing on erudition is by ridicule.

But it goes beyond what we read in Victorian novels; for some, it was a daily experience.

Was I always a skeptic, or at least an inveterate questioner? In exasperation, Mom once announced to the family that the first word I ever spoke was “why?”

The household I grew up in, as the youngest of five siblings, put some of the fear of questioning things into me. But that’s not to say it cured me. About 33 years later, our own, second child, “why’d” us a lot. We quickly discovered that Diego probably was to us, his parents, what I was to mine.

Let me explain: Continue reading →

We stopped at a fast-food place where, when you buy a burger, you get to put the mustard and ketchup on yourself. We also bought a side salad and got to pour the French vignette dressing on ourselves.

It was one of those days, when we could smell fall in the air and the change in temperature and climate made us want to go out for a snack rather than cook at home. I guess you could say we were out to butter our own nests.

My wife ordered a drink that’s dispensed from a self-service fountain, and decided on lemonade. One sip and she realized she’d gotten Gatorade instead. So, she mustard all the politeness she could to call attention to the Gatorade-lemonade confusion. “Oh, it’s really Gatorade. We ran out of lemonade, but everybody knows what it is,” the teeny-bopper explained to Bonnie. Continue reading →