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-...
Walkin'
02/19/2013 - 8:33pm
What I remember most about Aunt Izzy, my mother’s twin sister, is eating dinner at her table. Our family, the city slickers from Chicago, would visit her family, the farm folk, at least twice a year. Izzy had seven children with husband Ray, and Mom and Dad added five to make an even dozen. Not that there’d be 12 kids at a meal. By the time the...
Food for Thought
02/19/2013 - 8:31pm
How many jokes or anecdotes have you heard about the difficulty of holding onto a wet bar of soap? I always supposed that was one of the reasons for the invention of soap-on-a-rope. All the new shower gels and body washes have nearly made that, and the soap dish itself, obsolete, but I think they have quite a long way to go before reaching...
Walkin'
02/13/2013 - 9:37pm
I’ve been offered the sale of a handgun three times. The first was in the early 1980s when I lived in North Twin View Heights, a housing development outside of Solon. I was having breakfast at the nearby Vern’s Lakeside Cafe, a small restaurant run out of a converted mobile home. The sign out front boasted hot food and fresh bait. Inside, the dé...
Food For Thought
02/13/2013 - 9:34pm
Coming up with a column for a particular season or a specific holiday seems like a no-brainer to most people. “How simple,” they say, “you don’t have to thrash around looking for a topic to write about.” After close to 30 years of coming up with columns about New Year’s Day, Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, April Fool’s Day, May...
Food For Thought
02/06/2013 - 8:59pm
I marvel, almost daily, at the complexity and simplicity of our language. It seems to be a sort of magic that all the books, newspapers, movie scripts, poems, love letters and grocery lists are simply various combinations of those twenty-six little symbols that make up our alphabet. Even with the abuses and misuses, they seem to manage to...