Holidays

Veterans Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Their life consisted wholly and solely of war, for they were and always had been front-line infantrymen. They survived because the fates were kind to them, certainly—but also because they had become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.”—Ernie Pyle, World War II journalist, writing about what he saw at the front. Killed in action April 18, 1945.

I do not come from a family that talks much about its military service. My father was drafted in 1958, served his two-year-long tour, and then came back home to a job that had been held for him. This was during the Cold War, so he did not see action but he did see more of the world than he had up till then, or since. He served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War as a calculator tasked with determining missile flight paths. (I believe he worked with the Atlas missile, an early ICBM model.)
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Not-So Secret Admirer

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(It is a gray, rainy November day here in upstate New York. It is raining gray. To the beach we go …)

The Atlantic Ocean. Those tiny dots in the photo above are people with lives, voices, loved ones, losses. Sunburns.

We are standing in front of the “Beach Hut” at Smith Point County Park on the South Shore of Long Island. It is 2014, one of the more recent years in history. For much of my adult life, I have sat here internally convinced that I do not like “the beach.” I do not remember when I convinced myself of this. I do not remember an unpleasant beach incident that convinced me of this piece of self-knowledge.
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Trick and Treat

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Two years ago, the Martin Prosperity Institute released what it called its “annual survey” of Halloween in America. It was its third annual such survey and it has not produced a sequel to this seminal study of all things Halloween since. My hometown broke it, I guess.

The Institute’s work in the field of Halloween enjoyment, a study not seriously undertaken by most people older than eight, led in 2013 to many national news articles that expressed shock at its conclusion: that the best place for Halloween in the United States of America is Poughkeepsie, New York.
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