Opinions

Walkin'
05/09/2013 - 6:17pm
Brian Fleck
Pearl, our ditzy labradoodle, and I are in the doghouse lately. She committed her sin several weeks ago while we were watching Lexi, a Jack Russell terrier that comes to visit from time to time. Lexi is over 100 years-old in human terms, and has been given only several months to live from a variety of doggie disorders she’s contracted over the past decade. She keeps turning kibble into cobble, however, if you get my drift. Lexi’s owner attributes the dog’s against-...
Food for Thought
03/12/2013 - 6:20pm
I got a chuckle out of seeing that bumper sticker ahead of me while I waited at the stoplight. It got me thinking about all the crusades to save various species of wildlife I’ve seen over the years. When I was fresh out of college, there weren’t so many crusades, not nearly the number of animals designated as endangered as there are now, bumper...
Walkin'
03/06/2013 - 9:02pm
Barney almost shot me by accident, twice. The year was 1970, and I was working the night shift on the loading dock of the Marshall Fields Department Store in the Woodfield Mall outside of Chicago. I unloaded semi trailers as they arrived and then sorted the packages into two-dozen piles, one each for the drivers who delivered them the next day. I...
Food For Thought
03/06/2013 - 9:01pm
One of my good neighbors and I were chatting on the phone. You know how that goes– one topic leads to another and, before you know it, you’ve covered everything from recipes to politics, gardening to retirement, the flu epidemic to wind farms. I wish I could record such conversations because they often leave many things unfinished and, if I could...
Walkin'
02/27/2013 - 7:59pm
I’ve killed many a musca domestica, aka house fly, in my day. As a child visiting Wisconsin, one of my favorite barn chores was poisoning the little buggers. Grandma had an old-fashioned pump sprayer, which she filled, I’m guessing, with a capful of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, aka DDT, and water. This was long before we knew that the...
Food for Thought
02/27/2013 - 7:58pm
It was the summer of 1944. I would be starting fourth grade in September. We had moved to our acreage on the edge of Knoxville the preceding March. There were walnut trees, pear trees, raspberry bushes, and an old apple tree– and oddly enough, no cherry trees on what had once been a cherry orchard. My mother was making raspberry jelly from berries...