Author Archives: jimmcgarrah

It’s a quiet day in the classroom. The children are indifferent to the lesson. Some have heard similar concepts earlier in their academic careers and some have not. Nevertheless, it’s impossible for me to go forward with the course guidelines unless I first establish a baseline from which to proceed. I continue. “In the EnglishContinue reading “Keeping us Humane”

It wasn’t until I approached the age of sixty and happened to be studying the etymology of certain words that I discovered the root meaning of art was found in the ability to skillfully join or fit things together. That epiphany held no real surprise for me, however, because I instantly thought of Joe WhitehouseContinue reading “For the Sake of Art”

Those who advertise the “golden years” as the highlight of human life must be very young. Here you are trying to navigate a staircase with the twinge and pinch and shudder and shimmy of the fifteen bones you managed to break as a young man and people tell you that the age of mobility hasContinue reading “Navigating the Golden Years”

Yesterday, a friend asked me what I thought of the participation of veterans in the events at the Capital Building in Washington, D.C. this past week beginning on January 6. He knows I am a veteran of the Vietnam war wounded in combat and that I was also active in the anti-war movement upon beingContinue reading “Opinion and Truth Are Not Synonyms”

It was Halloween and 1961. The stars aligned over America to make a Catholic man named Kennedy president and put Alan Shepard in space. Elsewhere, construction started on the Berlin Wall and The Bay of Pigs invasion failed to depose Castro in Cuba. A company named Pampers introduced the first disposable diaper. The Shirelles hadContinue reading “The Value of Accountability”

In the spring of 1978 I determined to become the greatest trainer of thoroughbred horses that ever lived, surpassing even Sonny Jim Fitzsimmons and Lucien Lauren with my expertise. That went the way of many of my dreams, of course. But I had started down that path in the real world by taking a smallContinue reading “Horse Sense”

I saw this meme on Face Book today and all the comments about how it was a great question: one answer: Child porn is illegal and carries a huge jail sentence. Legal porn sites don’t stream it. So, it becomes a matter of catching criminals just like catching thieves, murderers and domestic terrorists, and lawContinue reading “Critical thought”

Riding the subway between Times Square and Greenwich Village not so long ago, I noticed a man wearing a blue nylon jacket, red ball cap, and faded Levis. He carried a light blue knapsack. The man seemed to be Hispanic, but in this time after 9/11 when all brown people carry the weight of beingContinue reading “Of Subways and Cynics”

If you happen to be in Athens, Georgia on most any given weekend you may subject yourself to the most amazing of culinary delights without ever entering a restaurant, an important consideration in the time of a pandemic. But you must be willing to wander as well through various neighborhood intersections till you discover theContinue reading “J.B. and the Perfect Polish Sausage”

The mind is a wonderful and terrible beast. Besides the ability to logically reason, we have the ability to logically associate. Where reasoning often gets us from point A to point B in rational order, associational logic can get us from point A to the twilight zone. This is a great gift if you areContinue reading “Juxtaposition and Its Relation to Yellow Journalism”