by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. Here is the most important four-letter word in the entire English language: home. It conjures up and is connected to every element of the well-lived life: spouse, family, peace, comfort, security. Nothing can match its importance, nothing can duplicate its significance. Nothing is more powerful than our memories …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note! Do you know the great Irish tenor John McCormack? If not, your grandmother surely did. “I tell you Mary Louise, he has the voice of an angel, an angel…” One of the multitude of songs he popularized and made his own was the famous tune “Silver threads among …
By Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. If you were a real boy, like my father and like me, you never saw a river you did not want to know better. But it had to be a river… a thing of shimmering possibilities, always moving, always beckoning, never the same, not even for an instant. …
By Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s program note. Every year, it seems, the opening date for Christmas marketing creeps forward, adding days, not just hours, to the already lengthy selling season. This year my cadre of Christmas watchers reported seasonal catalog and store sightings as early as Labor Day, September 8 . But you can count …
By Dr. Jeffrey Lant It is Sunday in Cambridge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The forecast is for inclement weather, buckets of rain, wide puddles to jump across, or, if you are of the distracted variety (I’m afraid I often qualify) to splash through unawares. Even with the intermittent rain, Cambridge will be on this …
By Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author’s note. To get into the mood of this special Father’s Day article, go to any search engine and find “Cat’s in the Cradle” sung by Harry Chapin in 1974. Its refrain is haunting, and every boy-turned-father understands the bite in the words, often painfully so… “A child arrived just the …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Today is Sunday, May 29, 2011. I shall celebrate it like millions of people worldwide by going to work, leaving me at the end of the day with only a tiny sliver of the leisure time my grandparents had every Sunday for their long lives. This continuing labor is not necessarily …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Today is Mother’s Day in the United States. It occurred just the other day in England… and will occur around the globe at various times all year long as millions of people make a point of honoring mother and making this day special for her. Those of us whose mother has …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Over the course of the last several months, I have been engaged in one of life’s unappealing necessities, sorting through dozens and dozens of boxes packed (often years and years ago) with an array of things dubbed too valuable to be thrown away, or at the very least items which deserved …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Go into any office in the world and its busy denizens will be emailing, leaving telephone messages, text messaging, etc. Each and every time they use these admittedly convenient devices, their necessary human to human communications skills are melting away. Tools that are supposed to help us communicate exact a terrible …