03.03.26
by

Aunt Bertha, Uncle Harry, and the Register-Mail

My mother’s uncle, Harry Young, was the circulation manager of the Register-Mail, the daily newspaper of Galesburg, Illinois. 

In those days, any city of 35,000, such as Galesburg, and many cities even smaller, had a daily paper—despite the cost and difficulty of printing the news every day.

There was no Internet. Computers were huge machines that took up whole rooms, and only rich corporations could afford one. 

Glen Beck and Betty Snyder program the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in 1947 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. U.S. Army photo.

Almost everyone subscribed to the daily paper, giving it the ability to charge good rates for advertising space. 

People got spot news from the radio, had done so for decades. Television was a new thing; most of the channels had an announcer behind a desk, reading news, for 15 minutes at six p.m. But to really get the news, you needed a broadsheet paper like the Register-Mail.

Did I mention, Dear Reader? It was made of paper!

Can you believe, kids used to have to deliver these things by hand? A stack of newspapers, photographed by Daniel R. Blume. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

They printed it fresh, with new contents, every day.

Reporters went out into the community, spoke with people, attended meetings, photographed events. Then they came back to the newspaper building—yes, newspapers had buildings—to a place called the newsroom, and pounded out their stories on manual typewriters, the kind with ink ribbons that were struck by metal bars with letters engraved on the end of them. Reporters and other typists had really strong fingers.

The stories rolled out as sheets of typewriter paper and were handed off to copy boys, who carried them to the copy desk, where an editor corrected errors with a blue pencil. Then it was off to the composition room, where skilled eyes and fingers, working from the edited copy, formed a body of type, one line at a time, out of molten lead. 

Sheep on a ranch in Tierra del Fuego, photographed no doubt from the south. Antonio Quintana (book author and copyright holder is Fernando Duran) – Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, 1893-1943.

Sometimes there was blank space left over at the bottom of a column. You couldn’t just press a button to adjust the spacing, so instead you inserted a filler—something like, “Patagonian sheep bear wool only on the southern side” or “Bituminous coal sales increased last year to 370,000 metric tons.”

Through a series of arcane steps, all of these story-bearing type elements came together on a printing press, which impressed the type lines in black ink on long rolls of paper. The newspaper’s large pages—six to eight columns wide—were cut, folded, assembled into a compact publication, and stacked in bundles of fifty or one hundred. 

At this point, Uncle Harry’s people—squads of paperboys and girls plus a few adult drivers for newsstands and rural deliveries—carried the newspapers to the reading public, in time to be read before supper. After supper, they were used to wrap the garbage.

Lots of other people were involved besides those already mentioned—clerks, librarians, stenographers, mechanics, pressmen, and part-time reporters called stringers. A typical small-city daily might give full-time work to dozens of people, and part-time earnings to many more.

#

Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha lived in a small, tidy brick bungalow on West Grove Street. It’s still there, decades later—or at least it was the last time Google drove by.

The Youngs’ house on Grove Street. Google Earth image.

Uncle Harry’s job was a day job, but it didn’t end when he left the Register-Mail building in the afternoon. Sometimes a subscribing household was skipped from the delivery. When they called the newspaper office around suppertime to complain, the call was forwarded to Uncle Harry’s home phone. He always had an extra copy or two in the car. Either before or after supper, he would drive out and make the delivery himself. This was a routine part of his otherwise managerial job. 

Uncle Harry wore a suit and tie to work and wing-tip shoes that he kept highly polished. He made good money and supported himself and Aunt Bertha well. They had no children but lavished attention on their nieces and nephews. 

They belonged to the Lake Bracken Country Club. Not for golf; they didn’t golf. But they loved to fish and spent many fine summer evenings fishing Lake Bracken, either from a boat or from the shore. They ate what they caught.

Uncle Harry broke his leg one time by stepping in a hole at Lake Bracken while carrying a load of fishing gear. Took him a long time to mend, since he was getting older. 

He worked at the Register-Mail until he was too sick to work anymore. He died in his sixties from complications of emphysema, having been a lifelong smoker. Aunt Bertha—a happy, sweet woman who was a favorite of all the nieces and nephews—was devastated. She died soon after, of a broken heart.

#

Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha.

In balmier days, we enjoyed their company. My sister and I were great-niece and great-nephew to them. Uncle Harry had a wry sense of humor and always delivered a laugh line at family gatherings. Aunt Bertha did not work outside the home, and her household chores were not onerous, so she often piled us into her Ford Victoria and took us swimming at Lake Bracken.

There was a large clubhouse that overlooked the swimming beach. The lower story was given over to locker rooms and showers for swimmers. The upper story had a dining room for evening events and a daytime snack bar just off the dining room. It was a swell place, but it burned down years ago and was never replaced. Lake Bracken these days is mostly a golf course and a suburban community. I think there is a small clubhouse there, away from the lakeshore—a nineteeth-hole kind of place.

Times change.

#

These days, journals of paper still exist, but they are less relied on. The Register-Mail still delivers a print version six days a week “for a retro feel when consuming the news.” (For example, if you’re a very old person.) But don’t worry—the print subscription includes the eNewspaper as well.

King Harald Bluetooth, right, is baptized by Poppo the monk, around 960 AD, in a relief dated around 1200. Photograph by Anagoria, licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Today we have something called a news cycle, and it is 24/7/365. People pick up information on the fly—through their TV, their laptop, their tablet, their phone. By something called Bluetooth. 

Bluetooth used to be an embarrassing dental condition. After that, it was the name of Norway’s king. Now, it’s a window to the world. 

There’s no longer any need to touch a smeary piece of paper. You can have your content beamed straight into your head. Nobody needs linotype operators anymore. Nobody needs pressmen.

And, frankly, why bother to pay an editor? Fact-checkers? Reporters? Nah. 

Even mere rewrite men are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence. 

More and more, our window to the world is filtered by something people trust precisely because they mistrust their own intelligence.

Uncle Harry might not have a job in today’s world. Aunt Bertha might have to go to work, perhaps as a barrista, and would certainly not have time to take anybody swimming. But that’s okay, because the swimming beach is closed anyhow.

#

Look at all we’ve gained. 

Until next time, Dear Reader, blessings be upon you. 

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.24.26
by

Archie, what hast thou wrought?

Archibald MacLeish. Public Domain.

Archibald MacLeish was a poet, a playwright, a great figure in American letters. He served as Librarian of Congress during the Second World War and apparently did a bang-up job of it. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—in 1933 and 1953 for books of poetry and in 1959 for a play, J.B.

In 1962, when I was a freshman at Knox College, Mr. MacLeish came to our school to give a speech. At the given hour—11 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, as I recall—I came to Alumni Hall, our massive, neo-romanesque theater, clutching my softback copy of the published script of J.B., which the college bookstore had stocked by the gross to prepare for the playwright’s visit. 

Climbing the front stairs and entering the small second-story lobby, I spied the literary lion in a tweed coat and dark vest, chatting with my English composition professor, Michael Crowell. 

“Mister Sommers!” Crowell boomed. “Come and meet Archibald MacLeish.” 

I stepped up and shook hands with the great man. He was trim and natty, with close-cropped gray hair, a hawklike nose, and dark, intense eyes. 

He looked five times more awake than I. 

I burbled a word or two and held out my book to him. He smiled, uncapped a huge silver fountain pen, and signed the title page in black ink. I thanked him and made a quick escape. I found a seat in the theater, and in due course he made his speech. I don’t remember what he said. Probably something about literature.

That I can no longer locate my autographed copy of J.B. may give you a reasonable estimate of the durability of literary fame.

#

I actually did read that play, J.B. It was supposed to be a modern American version of the biblical Book of Job. Not to throw shade on an undeniably fine poet and library leader, nor to quibble with the judgment of a bona fide Pulitzer Prize jury, nonetheless I recall feeling underwhelmed. It seemed to me the best parts of the play were long passages quoted directly from the Bible; the parts that had been rendered into a contemporary American setting were rather mundane by comparison with the scripture from which they sprang. 

These recollections bring us, in a deplorably roundabout manner, to the Book of Job, one of the great works of world literature. Have you read it? It’s easy to find in any standard Bible, tucked right between Esther and Psalms. 

It is a stark fable, a story of undeserved suffering and a seemingly callous God. It holds believers accountable for their faith in a way that no conventional tale could.

Job, the central character, is subjected to immense suffering and loss for no reason he can discern. Instead of giving him an explanation, God re-asserts his Almightiness and draws attention to Job’s creaturehood.

Three Friends Visit Job by Wanda Korzeniowska (Polish, 1874-1939). Public Domain.

In what screenwriting guru Robert McKee would label “an education plot,” Job’s inner landscape is changed—not by anything resembling justice in ordinary human terms but by the simple knowledge that God offers no rational choice except humility.

It’s a thoroughly Jewish answer to the problem of evil. If you feel the resolution of the story unsatisfying, you can hear the unseen narrator’s voice whispering: “Vell, vot did you expect?”

In today’s world, we see evil and injustice seemingly everywhere. The good are punished while the evil prosper. It seems, at times, unbearable.

One almost hates to mention in this regard: It was ever thus. 

There is nothing new about evil. It still stinks. 

We can fight it, but we won’t always win.

As in the days of the Old Testament, we can either cast aspersions at God or admit that the universe God has made is one altogether beyond our imaginations, where justice may have to be measured by divine standards rather than human. 

Archibald MacLeish, wherever you are—I invite you to put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Until next time,

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.17.26
by

Loyalty

Those Germans. They always know what they’re talking about, even if nobody else does. 

Those Germans. Carl Burckardt, Die jungen Deutschen. Public Domain. 

From the language that brought you Weltschmerz, Weltanschauung, Gemütlichkeit, and Fahrvergnügen, comes our old friend, Schadenfreude—taking pleasure at the misfortunes of others.

Volksvagen’s “Fahrvergnügen” ad. Fair use.

Right now, however, I’m focused on loyalty, and I’d like to commission the German language, if possible, to give us a word meaning nostalgia for the old loyalties of yore, now lost in our benighted era. 

In May 2024 Your New Favorite Writer posted a piece, “A Time Travelogue,” and a man wrote this week to thank me for it. 

The original post was a visit to the now-distant past, to the time when I was a boy in Streator, Illinois. I happened to mention “the Onized Club”; my correspondent happened to be Googling last week for “Onized.” That was, as investigators say on TV, the nexus. 

Onized jacket. Fair use.

The Onized Club was a company-sponsored club for the thousands who worked for Owens-Illinois Glass Company and their families. Owens was far the largest employer in Streator. The word “onized” was a transform of the words “Owens-Illinois” and “organized.” By going to work for Owens you became onized. People were proud of this club, which gave them various benefits—especially, wearing spiffy “Onized” fan gear around town. 

It was a company town. During the years when glass jars and bottles were being displaced for many uses by cheaper plastic or coated-paper containers, every quart of milk sold in Streator carried the legend: “See What You Buy—Buy in Glass!” Those who were onized naturally wanted to keep their high-paying jobs. They were grateful to the company. They were glad to be in the club.

The man who wrote me had been commissioned to do a project of some kind for the Streator Onized Credit Union. Puzzled by the term “onized,” he Googled it to find out what it meant and, voilà! found my blog post, which enlightened him on the origin of the term.

BUT HERE’S THE TWIST: As he continued reading, he “became nostalgic for a time I never knew when the richest among us funded the public good. A time when companies cared about their employees enough to spin up a credit union to make sure they had access to banking. A time when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways. . . . [Y]our article reminded me of what life could be like and for a moment, I was there – imagining I was Onized and cheering for my team.” 

Aw, gosh—now I’m all choked up.

#

But wait a minute, Dear Reader. Hold your horses. 

My new friend seems nostalgic for a time he never knew, “when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways.” Hence the need for a new German word. Perhaps Loyalitätsnostalgie—nostalgia for (an era of) loyalty.

The thing is: I have lived in both eras, and I’m not sure they’re all that different.

Don’t get me wrong. I venerate the ’50s and ’60s as a wonderful time—a golden era, with all sorts of good things that have been abandoned in our heedless rush for modernity. (Or, these days, postmodernity.)

But that’s partly because memory dwells on the good stuff. At least, my memory does.

A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. One remains useful; the other, not so much. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.

We all look back to the early years of our lives as the standard against which we measure all things. That’s why old duffers who have not touched an M-16 rifle or used a P-38 can opener in sixty years wear baseball caps with patches representing their old units and blubber unashamed tears when they meet fellow vets. It’s not because the service was so wonderful—it often wasn’t—but it was the capstone or climax to the early years of a person’s life, the passageway to adulthood. Often enough, as adults, we look backward to the more exciting and heady days of youth.

So what about it, Gentle Reader? Has the two-way tug of loyalty between employer and employee gone the way of the Great Auk? Does it live only in the past?

I don’t think so. To begin with, it’s not clear that all rich people, or all large corporations (the two categories are not identical) were stalwart stewards of the public good in old times. Second, for every splashy billionaire we see in today’s media behaving like an ass, there is a quieter billionaire out in the hinterlands working patiently for a better world. We have a good example right here in Wisconsin: Judith Faulkner, creator and sole owner of Epic Systems, Inc.—who, besides having invented a very beneficial medical software, is methodically working to give away 99 percent of her net worth to worthy causes during her lifetime. There must be many other examples.

I know there are a lot of lesser companies in small towns across the nation, delivering great goods and services with workforces who are proud of what they are doing and of the company in whose employ they do it. 

Loyalty will always be with us. It’s the glue that holds our society together. It works so well because it is a two-way street. Smart bosses go to extraordinary lengths to get and keep good employees, and those employees work not only for their bosses but for their communities. 

Relationships of mutual loyalty not only abound in the business world, they also make schools, churches, libraries, hospitals, and all kinds of nonprofits work. 

Those who do not live within a web of loyal relationships would be well advised to keep seeking. Such relationships are out there for the having. When you find an employer, a partner, or an institution worth giving your loyalty to, make sure you respond in kind.

Then you’ll truly know the joys of Beziehungsglück (relationship happiness).

Worth thinking about until next time.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.10.26
by

Ultra-Gnomic

©2021 by Larry F. Sommers

Read Time: 12 minutes

Dear Reader: Please pardon this repeat post. I’ll try to get you something new next week. But for now, please enjoy this bizarre bit of speculative fiction, first posted here five years ago. It’s not what I normally write, but maybe there’s a laugh or two in it for you. I would welcame any comments..

#

PANADON, A GNOME OF THE INFERIOR GRADE, WAS GOBSMACKED. He had never seen a creature so bewitching as the one who admitted him to the back office of Novotny’s Pizza Palace. 

It was taller than he by half, though not generally so wide as it was tall. It looked down at him from a round, freckled face and pierced him with a thrust of its violet eyes. 

His granite composure crumbled to such a degree that he felt the full weight of the 247 pounds of gold in his left hand.

Where was he? What was he doing? What was his mission? 

Oh, yes. “Novotny.”

“Mister Novotny is out.” The creature fluttered its eyelids. “I’m Lucinda Potts, his assistant. How may I assist you?”

Did Panadon look like one who needed assistance? If the creature assisted Novoty, why did it offer to assist Panadon instead? Irregular. It made him nervous. But he must make the delivery. He teetered on the wood threshold.

Pizza with fresh Mediterranean herbs. Photo by Sahand Hoseini on Unsplash.

Lucinda Potts frowned. “Are you dizzy? Perhaps you should step inside.” Lucinda backed away from the door with that gentle, swaying grace that Panadon had imagined would be the way of she-gnomes. Not that he had any practical experience with she-gnomes. But, more to the point: Could this be a she-human?

He stumbled into the little office room. To stand near Lucinda Potts in cramped quarters was a delicious sensation, compounded of fresh Mediterranean herbs and essence of Lucinda. But, back to business. “I brought the gold.”

She zeroed in on the case at the end of Pandon’s arm. “You had better set it on Mister Novotny’s desk.” She glided across the room, swept a pile of papers from the desk. 

Panadon laid the case down and opened it for inspection. Inside lay one bar of pure gold,  about the size of a large paving block.

“Whole Gold Bar on Wood” by BullionVault is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Lucinda gasped. “Close it, please.” 

He did so.

Panting, she placed a hand at her throat. “Forgive me. I’ve never seen so much gold.”

“Four million, six hundred eighty-two thousand, eight hundred seventy-three dollars’ worth,” Panadon said. A pointless precision, since no receipt was to be given; his orders had been explicit on that point. So why did he state the amount? To impress Lucinda Potts?

He felt hot and stuffy. “Why do you stare at me?”

“You’re not like the others.” She smiled. “They have pointy heads, but yours is flattened, as if it wanted to spill over the sides.” 

He groaned. Why fixate on the shape of his head? The very reason all the hosts of the Gnomic ovals—or, rather, those few who took note of him at all—ignored his proper name and called him Muffintop. Must she, like they, pounce on a mere deformity? 

He drew himself to full height, gazed upward, and spoke straight to her face. “Pay no heed to my head, Miss Lucinda Potts. I assure you I am all pointy inside.”

And why did she make a purring sound?

#

Malkebart stood before Clanbert Wabengner, Chief of Precious Metals Underwatch, Europe Division. He stood upright and trembled at proper intervals, though filled with glee.

“Malkebart,” the old gnome whined, “can you comprehend what a threat this was—is—to me? I was forced to dispatch a dolt with three full warkins of aurum lucidum to buy this Novotny’s silence.”

“A dolt?”

“Muttonchop, or Bufflehead, or some such. One of our toilers in the Far Beneath.” 

Bufflehead? “Muffintop, you mean, perchance?”

“Yes, that’s it!” cried Clanbert. “Trufflescap.”

“Why him?” 

“The most convenient dolt, you see, Malkebart. Detailed some ages ago to mind the slow congealment of a drift of gold some miles below Cisalpine-yet-Transpanadine Gaul, he watched over an inconspicuous lode large enough to make an impression on our pizza man.”

“Yet small and remote enough, I suppose, Your Slyness, that the Ultra-Gnomic Council’s auditors might easily overlook it?”

Clanbert Wabengner coughed. A look of pain settled on his conical old face. “Well, what was I to do? How did that Novotny get wind that I was connected to his scheme? There is my position to think about!”

“Calm yourself, sir. Apoplexy does not become you.” Malkebart raised his brows as if struck by a new thought, which was really only one that he had already thought and had conveyed to his cohort Novotny. “Those long-bearded ultras who run the Council pretend everything we do is for the good of humanity. If they thought you were using subterranean vectors to convey contraband—”

“Precisely, Malkebart. They would have me pickled in brine and replaced by one of their grand-nephews. Then they would crown one another with laurels for their virtue in the matter.”

#

“Nerves” Novotny crashed through the front door well before opening time. He shouted “Get to work! Put some zip into it!” as usual and rushed through the kitchen to his office.

There he stopped cold, because the oddest three-foot courier he had ever seen stood toe-to-toe with Lucinda Potts while she made strange, bubbly sounds. “What’s this?”

Lucinda swiveled her chubby head. “He has brought something you ought to see, Myron.”

“How many times I gotta tell you, it’s Mister Novotny in front of the help,” he said, not taking his eyes off the gnome with the big head. 

“Nonetheless, you ought to see.” Lucinda turned away from the creature, waddled over to Novotny, grabbed him by the left hand, and dragged him to his desk, where a small leather case lay.

“Open it,” said Lucinda.

He lifted the lid and staggered back. “Is that . . . what I think it is?”

“Pure gold, Mister Novotny,” piped the gnome in a treble, not unpleasant, voice. “Raised and harvested it myself.” 

“Raised. You grew it?”

“After a manner of speaking. Metals take form, as Mister Aristotle so clearly explained,  when vaporous exhalations are condensed underground. I cannot make gold grow, but I have attended its growth since youth. It has now ripened and is yours.”

“Mine.” Novotny stepped up to the brick and tried to lift it. “Ow, it’s so heavy I can’t get my fingers under it. That’s a lotta gold.”

 “Four million, six-hundred-some thousand dollars, he says,” noted Lucinda.

Novotny looked Panadon in the eye. “What’s the catch?”

“Catch? There is no catch. We earth-cruisers delight in supplying worthy humans such as yourself with as much wealth as they can use. It is our duty.”

“Right.” Novotny frowned. “Lucinda, how we gonna get this in the closet? I can’t even lift it.” 

“I can help you with that,” said Panadon. He stepped forward, closed and latched the case, and hoisted it by its handle with ease.”Where do you want it?”

“Over here.” Lucinda opened a door. She pointed inside. Panadon began to set the case on an overloaded wooden shelf beside a lot of whitish, cakey things, then thought better of it. The shelf might collapse. 

He set the case of gold on the floor. “You have a lot of white powder, in cake form,” he said, by way of conversation.

Novotny slammed the closet door. “We, uh, use it in the pizza dough.”

Panadon, whose head had just missed being pinched as the door slammed shut, wheeled to face Novotny. “No. You don’t.”

“What?”

“You do not use those white powder cakes to make pizza. You use them for something else. Something nefarious.”

Nerves Novotny grew red in the face. “Nefari—Listen, buddy, go back where you came from. Tell your boss thanks for the gold. I don’t need you around here with insinuations about drugs.”

Lucinda gasped.

“So, drugs, then, is it?” said Panadon. “That’s illegal and immoral. You’re not a fit recipient of our largesse. I must take the gold back.” He reached for the handle of the closet door.

Something clanged against the narrow side of his flat head. Ouch! 

Panadon looked around and saw that Novotny had whacked him with a large pizza tray, then tossed it aside. Now he held a nasty-looking pistol, aimed at Panadon. “Over your dead body, Shorty.”

At that moment, Lucinda gracefully swooped over and bit Novotny on the gun hand.

“Ouch!” cried the crook as the gun fell to the floor.

Panadon stepped forward, picked up the pistol, crumpled it in his hand. Then he advanced on Novotny. Nerves fled his restaurant the way he had come in.

Lucinda gaped, awestruck, at Panadon. “All those powdery cakes were delivered by pointy heads. They kept bringing them, but the stash in the closet never got bigger. I wondered about that. Almost like somebody came and took them away in the night. How did you know they were illegal drugs?”

“I did not know. I only sensed a great wrong. We have, ahem, a certain intuitive gift.”

“Aw, gee,” said Lucinda. 

“I’ll take my gold now,” Panadon said, almost apologetically.

She opened the closet door. “It’s a shame you had to come all this way.”

#

Crime does not pay. So stood the unanimous view of the ultra-gnomes gathered in the Council chamber forty miles below The Hague. 

The head of the Ultra-Gnomic Council? Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash.

They had polished off today’s agenda rather handily: Ousted the poltroon Clanbert Wabengner from his post and banished him, with his henchman Malkebart, to the quasi-pre-Cambrian lead mines in the deep crust; appointed one of their own number, Grizedek Bomf, in his place; and bestowed a Certificate of Merit plus a nice promotion on the oddly-shaped gnome who had uncovered Clanbert’s vile subterfuge.

As Panadon left their august presence, assured of the opportunity to supervise a dozen underwatchers on a large platinum deposit beneath Saskatchewan, he thrilled at the thought that some of his new colleagues would be she-gnomes. Perhaps one would remind him of the gracious Miss Lucinda Potts, now installed in his mind as Permanent Dream Girl.

“And what was that young fellow’s name again?” asked an aged member of the Ultra-Gnomic Council. “The one with the flat head?”

“Mumblestump,” said the member on his left as each awarded the other a fresh laurel wreath, in cognizance of their mutual virtue.

The End

How could this story have been better? Feel free to post a comment, or email me at larryfsommers@gmail.com.

Larry F. Sommers

02.03.26
by

The Book Bidness

How’s this for a business plan?

  1. Write something.
  2. Print up multiple copies and sell them.
  3. Become rich and famous.

Simplicity itself, I think you’ll agree. But authors still struggle with it. Especially Step 3.

Dear Reader, I ask you: What’s the difference between an author and an extra-large pizza?

Answer: An extra-large pizza can feed a family.

Believe me when I tell you the book business is tough.

#

Castleman

Fortunately for us literary lions, historical perspective is close at hand, courtesy of Michael Castleman. The author of many books, both fiction and non-fiction, Castleman has had a ringside seat to the book business for decades. For the last eighteen years, he has been working on a book about it. Now, after three rejected drafts and much revision, he brings us The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (The Unnamed Press, 2024).

This volume is indispensable reading for any author, publisher, agent, or bookseller. It covers the waterfront. The author’s nuanced and occasionally sardonic view of the industry may be inferred from a few of his chapter heads:

  • “Gutenberg Went Bankrupt”
  • “How to Reduce the Price of Books: Piracy”
  • “Goodbye Forever, Mrs. Weathersby, I’ve Joined Book-of-the-Month”
  • “Everyone Struggles With Amazon”

But though Castleman presents an unvarnished chronicle, one feels somehow encouraged: After hundreds of years of commercial publishing, replete with blighted dreams and corporate connivery, we still want to make books and people still want to read them. There must be something all right with a business like that, even if most of its denizens are going broke.

Castleman touches lightly on the period from troglodyte narratives offered around the fire through the production of medieval texts by hand copying. But his real focus is on the business of printed books, from Gutenberg till now. 

He says there has not been one book business. There have been three.

The First Book Business

Johannes Gutenberg. Public Domain.

“The first book business,” Castleman writes, “began with Johananes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and lasted 450 years through the end of the nineteenth century.” It was an author-centric cottage industry. You wrote a book, hired someone with a press to print it, and hawked copies to the public on the streets if need be. All authors were what today we call self-published. A few got rich, but most had to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.

The Second Book Business

“By World War I,” the author says, “industrial publishing produced the second book business, now called ‘traditional publishing,’ though it lasted only eighty of the book business’s six hundred years.” 

This second book business was publisher-centric. Now, instead of paying a printer to print his manuscript, the author, likely represented by an agent, could sell publication rights to a publisher. This professional publisher then would pay the printer, market the books through bookstores, and feed back to the author a fraction of the revenue as a royalty—keeping the rest as profit. 

This “traditional publishing” model is the one we think of as normal. You know, where the author pockets a huge advance and goes on a nationwide promotional tour arranged and paid for by the publisher. But in reality, only a few authors receive large sums of money in the form of advances or earned royalties. Even authors whose books sell well usually have to take their publishers’ word on how much money they are owed. And successful books have always been subject to piracy by foreign publishers.

In the second book business, a few got rich, but most had to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.

The Third Book Business

“Around the millennium,” Castleman notes, “the digital revolution launched the third book business.” This business—the one we work in now—is still in its birth pangs. Huge conflicts and controversies abound. No dust has settled, and great clouds of it are being kicked up by everything from Kindle and audiobooks to print-on-demand and artificial intelligence.

It’s enough to make a literary luminary swoon, Gentle Reader. We are all—from Stephen King down to Your New Favorite Author—all of us are treading warily through terra incognita.

Only a few make any serious money; but that’s how it always was.

Steinbeck with Charley. Photo by Hans Namuth/Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.

The late John Steinbeck, who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, The Pearl, Travels with Charley, and a long shelf of other highly acclaimed books during the middle part of the previous century, once said:

 “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” 

And these days, in the time of the third book business, still it can honestly be said: A few get rich, but most have to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.

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Don’t underestimate that motive, Dear Reader. There is something wonderful about seeing your words in print. It’s a thrill, no matter how much it costs. 

So now, having vented my thoughts about the book business, thanks to the spur of Michael Castleman’s wonderful book, I shall retire to my library full of leather-bound volumes, don my herringbone tweed coat with leather patches on the sleeves, pack and light my Kaywoodie briar pipe, and bang away at my trusty old Underwood typewriter till dawn.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

01.27.26
by

Memoirs of Note

In August 1938, the musical von Trapp Family of Salzburg packed suitcases, walked out their back gate, crossed the lane to the railroad station, and caught the first train to Italy. 

Movie poster for The Sound of Music. Fair use.

“NO, WAIT! You’ve got that all wrong, O New Favorite Writer. Everybody knows they slipped out of a performance, donned knapsacks, and hiked across the Alps to Switzerland.” 

Au contraire, Gentle Reader. What Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, and their adorable kids did in The Sound of Music would have required a mountain trek of 200 miles or more. Absurd, when there were trains every day from Salzburg to Italy—a place where, incidentally, they were already citizens.

And oh, by the way: Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp’s second wife, Maria (think Julie Andrews), did not teach his children the elements of song (“Do—a deer, a female deer; Re—a drop of golden sun; Mi—a name I call myself . . .”). The whole family were already accomplished singers and instrumentalists when she came into the household as teacher to von Trapp’s third child, who had been sick.

And oh, by the way: The eldest Trapp child was not Liesl, but Rupert. And the next eldest Trapp child, the eldest daughter, was still not Liesl, but rather, Agathe. (None of them were Liesl, but it’s a nice, German-sounding name.)

1940 photo of Baroness Marie von Trapp (front) and five of her ten singing children (back row, left to right) Agatha, Hedwig and Johanna; (center, left to right) Marie and Martina. Photo by C.M. Stieglitz, World Telegram staff photographer. Public Domain.

Agathe von Trapp is the one who, still clear-minded and articulate at the age of ninety, published a 2003 memoir titled Memories Before and After The Sound of Music—a book Your New Favorite Writer has just finished reading. 

The real story of the von Trapps lacks the surefire dramatic contours of The Sound of Music, but it’s compelling, charming, and inspiring in a different way. I found it a fascinating read, mainly because it’s a clear glimpse of a bygone world. 

Agathe von Trapp was born into the Austro-Hungarian Empire—an entity that ceased to exist five years after her birth, when World War I ended. Her father had been an officer in the Austrian navy, which was no longer needed when Austria gave up its Dalmatian seacoast in the Treaty of Versailles. 

The country Agathe von Trapp was born into: The Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914, URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/map-austro-hungarian-empire-1914, (Manatū Taonga — Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 28-May-2024

Georg von Trapp lost his naval commission (demise of empire), most of his money (postwar financial crisis), and his wife, Agatha Whitehead (scarlet fever). When the new teacher, Maria Augusta Kutschera, came on the scene, the family needed a way to survive—and music became the answer.

The Trapp Family Singers sang themselves into Europe-wide demand in the few years before Hitler took over Austria. At that fateful moment, they had just received an invitation to undertake a coast-to-coast concert tour in the United States. Austria’s borders were about to be closed by the Nazis. Georg von Trapp was from Istria on the Balkan peninsula, a part of Austria which went to Italy in the postwar realignment, so the family had automatically become Italian citizens and received Italian passports. They just caught a train and got out of town. 

Next season, they toured the United States and were warmly received everywhere. Coming to rest in Vermont, they built a resort hotel where music lovers could visit them in the summer, between touring seasons. After a few years, the children recognized they had to go their own separate ways, following individual dreams. But their family’s success during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s had come from pulling together, intelligently and with love, acting together as a unit. 

It was a delightful read, informed by Agathe’s accurate memory and illustrated by her own line drawings of important places and scenes. Like all the von Trapps, Agathe was a person of many talents. Her story, really the story of her family’s navigation from the Hapsburg Empire to modern times, is inherently worth a read.

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A whole different thing is what we get from And There I Stood With My Piccolo—one of three memoirs penned by the late Meredith Willson, floutist, bandleader, composer, and storyteller extraordinaire.

Publicity for the movie version of The Music Man. Fair use.

If you don’t know Meredith Willson, he is the fellow who created every bit of The Music Man, one of the great musical shows in Broadway history. He followed up The Music Man with another pretty good musical called The Unsinkable Molly Brown. But everybody would say The Music Man is his chef-d’oeuvre.

Some time ago, I read his memoir But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, in which he told the story of how The Music Man came to be created and produced. It was truly entertaining, but it left me with the feeling that somehow this corn-fed Iowa musician magically appeared on Broadway one day with the perfect musical show about musicians in Iowa. 

This book tells the rest of the story. It was originally published in 1948, nine years before The Music Man opened on Broadway. When Willson wrote this memoir he had not yet accomplished, nor even fairly begun, his life’s major work. But it shows that he did not come out of nowhere. 

Meredith Willson in 1961. Public Domain.

“New York talk was a heck of a shock to me,” he says. Maybe that’s because, having lived his whole adult life in New York and California, he still talked like an Iowa boy. Or at least, he wrote like one.

This memoir builds on a big contradiction: A man who couldn’t wait to get out of Mason City and conquer the musical world of New York writes most eloquently and passionately about the sounds, sights, and memories of his boyhood in Iowa. Despite having spent decades hobnobbing with the glitterati of the show-biz world, and despite his obvious pride at having become one of them, he achieved his life’s masterwork by bringing Mason City to a New York stage.

He was born in 1902—eleven years before Agathe von Trapp was born in Austria! He wound up chronicling that innocent period before the Great War which was known, even in America, by French names like fin-de-siècle or Belle Epoque. In Iowa the Belle Epoque looked like farm boys smoking corn silk behind the barn. In this work we get a fair amount of very particular boyhood reminiscence. 

But we get something else: We get a flying tour of the period between about 1920 and 1950—roughly the same between-the-wars era that Agathe von Trapp describes in the European context.  

Willson’s life in these decades reads like it’s lifted from the pages of Variety. He clearly delights in dropping names. His recollections, interspersed with homespun Iowa philosophy, are mostly anecdotes involving famous musicians and other entertainers with whom Willson had business  and personal relationships. 

Meredith Willson in 1937. Public Domain.

To someone like Your New Favorite Writer, this book was a treasurehouse of innocent merriment. To you, Dear Reader, I would say it depends on your era and your historical interests.

Here is a sample of the people mentioned in this slim book, most of whom Willson knew personally: Eugene Ormandy, Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, John Philip Sousa, Victor Herbert, George Jessel, Chauncey DePew, Lee DeForest, Walter Damrosch, Arturo Toscanini, Nelson Eddy, Phil Harris, Ted Fio Rito, Horace Heidt, Anson Weeks, Kay Kyser, Carlton Morse, Bill Goodwin, Xavier Cugat, Ralph Edwards, Mel Blanc, Amos ’n’ Andy, Lum and Abner, Mortimer Snerd, Stoopnagle and Budd, Gene Autry, Ferde Grofé, Pinky Lee, Jerry Lester, Pierre Monteux, Herb Caen, Lanny Ross, Hattie McDaniel, Jack Haley, Warren Hull, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Buddy Ebsen, Robert Montgomery, Norma Shearer, Ed Gardner, Darryl Zanuck, George Kaufman, Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Charlie Chaplin, Sam Goldwyn, William Wyler, Frank Morgan, Fannie Brice, Robert Young, Fred Waring, Adolph Zukor, Frank Sinatra, Ken Carpenter, Harold Lloyd, Ray Noble, George Burns, and Gracie Allen.

My point is: If half or more of these names ring a bell for you, then you’ll probably enjoy this chatty little book as much as I did. If not, you may still enjoy it—but you’ve got a lot of Googling ahead of you. 

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Why do I combine these two books, one by Agathe von Trapp and one by Meredith Willson, in the same post? For one thing, I read them back-to-back. For another thing: They are scintillating memoirs by two people living through the same period of history—one in Old School Europe, the other in brash young America. 

Both of them shed light not only on their own lives and doings, but on the whole milieu in which they lived—the fleeting years between the First World War and the advent of television. They were interesting years, “lost” years in some ways. They were mostly before my time, but I happen to like reading about them.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

01.20.26
by

Life in 2026

My friend Kimberly recently posted:

“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE REST OF YOU. I AM STRUGGLING WITH WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD. ANY WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT?”

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Yes, Kimberly, try these:

God is not finished with us yet. 

It’s easy to get discouraged when we are fed a constant stream of the most outlandish and outrageous things happening somewhere, anywhere, in our tired old world. 

But everything that’s happening now has happened before, over and over again. 

There was a gag in the Fifties that went like this: 

They told me, “Cheer up, things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough . . . things got worse!

Woman with a conical straw hat planting rice in a paddy field at golden hour, in Don Det, Si Phan Don, Laos. Photo by Basile Morin, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

In times like these, I feather my own nest; I tend to my knitting; I weed my garden. These are all metaphors, Kimberly. I don’t actually do those particular activities.

The point is, I show up every day. I take people one by one. I try to respond to their needs as I can discern them—especially each person’s need to be treated with dignity and respect.

I hear folks’ concerns, but when those concerns are political—usually informed by media reports of matters far from our daily lives—I safeguard them in File 13 and redirect the conversation.

An old Chinese poem, perhaps the oldest extant Chinese poem, says:

When the sun comes out, we go to work;

when the sun goes in, we rest.

We plow the fields so we can eat;

we dig wells so we can drink.

What has the Emperor’s power to do with us?
Green rice sheaves planted in a paddy field at golden hour in Don Det, Si Phan Don, Laos. A thin opaque film on the surface of the water welcomes the long recumbent shadows of the stems. Photo by Basile Morin, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

I focus on the here-and-now and on my own responses, which ultimately are the only things within my control. Yes, I can control my own thoughts, words, and deeds. 

Some may think me cold-blooded, but I simply do not get urges of the heart that compel me to act out of character. My heart, if I have one, is not that kind of heart. 

Calm, philosophical detachment may be impossible if you have another kind of heart. If so, all I can say is you are in for a lot of woe that I have managed to avoid over the past eighty years.

Despite my distance from the flames of passion—or because of it—I am active, upbeat, and productive in my actual life. I meet each day with a certain zest, untroubled by a whole world of troubles, confident the sun will rise again tomorrow. 

That’s enough for an old man. 

I wish you all peace and contentment.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

01.13.26
by

Costa Rica

Please accept my apologies, Dear Reader, for not posting last week. Here is my excuse: We were in Costa Rica. 

Here we are in Costa Rica.

Even so, I planned to post on Tuesday as usual, but something happened. My computer went haywire when we were less than halfway through our two-week trip. It was not convenient to remedy this problem while in Costa Rica, so I shut the thing down and did not look at it again until we returned to Madison. Then it took a few days to get up and running again with a new machine. 

So here I am, back again, just in time to post for Tuesday. Could I have posted last week, I would probably have come up with something beyond wonderful. But at this moment, all I’ve got is a mini-travelog on Costa Rica.

Having just landed on a jungle strip in Tortuguero.

It’s a great place to visit, Gentle Reader. Go if you get the chance. 

Costa Rica is one Central American republic that works very well. You can drink the water. The roads are good. The electricity is reliable.

But why would you go? 

A Montezuma oropendola in flight. Photo by Paulo Philippidis, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Scientists believe Costa Rica was part of the last piece of American landmass that rose from the ocean, only a few million years ago. That completed a connection between the North and South American continents. Plants and animals, previously isolated, flowed from north and south into the space between. Agoutis and raccoons, ospreys and Montezuma oropendolas, red-eyed tree frogs, crocodiles, blue morpho butterflies, two-fingered and three-fingered sloths, and four different species of New World monkeys–spider, squirrel, howler, and white-faced capuchin–mingle extravagantly across a wild landscape.

Big voice of the jungle: a golden-throated howler monkey and baby. Photo by Rhododendrites, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Because of that mixing of previously isolated species, and because the land is mountainous, with varying elevations, wind patterns, and ocean currents, Costa Rica possesses more natural environmental diversity than almost any place on earth. Seashore, mountain peaks, volcanoes, sun, rain, tides—and hordes of birds, reptiles, mammals, insects, and other creatures—occupy this tropical slice of heaven. 

The human inhabitants, by the way, are first-rate. Friendly, helpful, literate, and industrious, they’ll help you enjoy your stay. 

In the rainforest canopy, via hanging bridge. Looks like we’re having a good time.

My wife, Jo, and I visited twelve years ago. Our visit this year brought back fond memories, though the experiences were different. The tourism business is more highly developed now than it was a mere twelve years ago, but not enough to spoil the fun. 

This time we brought our daughter, Katie, and her two teenagers, Elsie and Tristan. We stayed in four different areas. We took nature hikes, lounged in hot springs from a volcano, challenged the surf at a Pacific Ocean beach, and went whitewater rafting, ziplining, snorkeling, and volcano climbing. A good time was had by all. 

Next week I’ll get back to some other topic, but in the immediate afterglow of our trip, it’s just nice to know a place like Costa Rica exists, even in January. 

Not to mention: You can’t find a bad cup of coffee in the whole country. 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

12.30.25
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Three Favorite Films

In a recent workshop, novelist Barbara M. Britton said, “What are your three favorite movies? What do they have in common? Those are apt to be the themes and topics you hold dearest as a writer.” 

In the last analysis, It’s a Wonderful Life is all about home and family. Public Domain photo.

That impressed me, because it’s true. 

How does it apply to Your New Favorite Writer? My three all-time favorites are sentimental Christmas movies. 

I like many kinds of films. I’m tickled by screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby or The Gods Must Be Crazy. I like great political satires such as Romanov and Juliet, Dr. Strangelove, or The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming. I’m bolstered by writing, directing, and acting brilliance as displayed in Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, or any film by the late, great Hitchcock.

But the three I would choose to answer Barbara’s question are: Meet Me In St. Louis, It’s a Wonderful Life, and We’re No Angels. The first is a cozy domestic drama, the second a stark morality play with an Everyman hero, and the third a blackish comedy in which the stock villain gets a hilarious comeuppance.

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So, what do these three flicks have in common? And what does that say about the subject matters and themes in my own writing?

“Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Judy Garland comforts Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis. Screen grab, fair use.

These films are old. Meet Me In St. Louis came out in 1944,  It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946,  and We’re No Angels in 1955. I like people and things that are my age. This backwards look is my brand, if I have a brand. The fiction I write tends to be historical. Most of the posts here relate, one way or another, to times past. I like to explore the days of yore because I think that all treasures worth having, all the secrets of life, reside there.

Why Christmas movies, in particular? I happen to be a Christian and attach theological meaning to Christmas. To me, it seems Christmas is when our Creator showed how much he cares for us by taking on all the burdens of our creaturehood. The  birth of Jesus is the event that starts the reconciliation of God and man. That theme strikes a deep chord in my heart.

In these films, the characters—ordinary folks like you and me, not rich and powerful people—have their lives, their homes, and their families restored to how they should be. In a deep sense, this is a kind of homecoming.

One of the chief plot lines of literature is that of someone returning home. Odysseus, the Prodigal Son, E.T., Dorothy Gale—all are bound on homeward journeys. In the films I love most, the characters have not necessarily left home, but their homes are threatening to leave them. 

The Smith family of St. Louis, the Baileys of Bedford Falls, and the Ducotel family in the French Caribbean colony of Cayenne all face crises in which their homes are about to disappear, leaving them suspended, as memoirist Dinty W. Moore might say, “between panic and desire.” 

The purpose of the plot is to break open a new dispensation, a new state of affairs in which the characters can find their way home. A path is opened. In each case, this shifting paradigm of reality comes as a mental transformation.

Three of Santa’s helpers drop in on a distraught family, just in time for Christmas. Aldo Ray, Humphrey Bogare, and Peter Ustinov in We’re No Angels. Fair use.

In St. Louis, Alonzo Smith suddenly realizes that success is not counted in dollars or prestige, but in his family’s happiness. In Bedford Falls, George Bailey is awakened, through Divine Intervention, to the fact that all these years he has not been wasting his time in meaningless sacrifice but investing in the currency of abiding love. In Cayenne, the inward epiphany comes not to the family whose home is saved but to the trio of criminals who enact that salvation. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the revelation, as long as the audience gets to experience it. 

So I guess the cat is out of the bag. I like stories that bring people home, bring them in from the cold, reunite families, and restore harmony in local communities. 

In The Price of Passage, I wrote about people displaced from their homes—Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves. They prove Thomas Wolfe’s assertion that you can’t go home again. They are called to rise above their loss of home and create new spaces where they and their offspring will eventually find their harbor.

In Izzy Strikes Gold!, I focused on a 12-year-old boy being jolted from his comfort zone by family circumstances. Will Izzy have to leave home? If so, will he find a new home? Those are the dramatic questions addressed.

My current manuscript follows two brothers who can’t coexist at home with each other; their mutual resentment is too great. War intervenes and poses the question whether the brothers will ever be able to find each other again and re-establish their family relationship. I don’t know that answer because I haven’t read the book yet.

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What is the point of all this rumination? Simply to help me find and become more aware of the central themes in my writing. Ideas that reside close to the writer’s heart make for authenticity in his voice. So these are the kinds of things a guy likes to know.

See you next week, Dear Reader, when it will be about Something Completely Different.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

12.23.25
by

The Gathering

Visit of the Wise Men, from an 1894 Sunday School lesson, by lithographers Harris, Jones & Co. of Providence. Public Domain.

Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve. On Thursday morning, as Santa’s sleighbells jingle away to the North, the Big Day itself will arrive. 

This will be my eightieth Christmas on Earth. 

The first few of those eighty are lost in the mists of time, permanently and perpetually outside my experience. But I recall clearly the next several after that. I remember times of gathering and feasts of togetherness. 

After the workday—most folks used to put in a whole day on December 24—Mom and Dad piled us into the car and we drove in darkness over the hundred miles from the city of Streator to the little town of Knoxville on the Illinois prairie, to gather with family.

1936 Plymouth, from an old postcard. Fair use.

The car was a 1936 Plymouth or a 1939 Chevrolet—both of them relics from an old-time gangster movie—or, later, our first modern car, a 1954 Plymouth. I sat in the back seat with my sister Cynda. We all four sang Christmas carols all the way down the road. Over the river—both Illinois and Spoon—and near some woods but mostly through plateaus of snow-dusted corn stubble, to Grandmother’s house we went.

It was all about gathering. Being together. 

The “-gether” part of “together” is really the same word as “gather.” From Old English gaderian, meaning to unite or join.  

We gathered together with Grandma and Grandpa, with Uncle Dick and Aunt Jane and Cousin Rick, with Uncle Garrett and Aunt Edith and Cousins Steve and Betsy, with Aunt Jo and Uncle Earl, with Aunt Jean and her boyfriend Richard Henderson, with Aunt Sue and Aunt Linda; with Grandma’s sister Aunt Bertha and her husband Uncle Harry Young; with Dad’s parents, my Grandma and Grandpa Sommers, who had no other children left in the Midwest and so joined the LaFollette mélange; and sometimes we would even see Grandma LaFollette’s brother Uncle Roy Dredge and his wife, Aunt Eva.

Eighteen of us including the unpictured photographer, who is probably Aunt Bertha, plus General George C. Marshall on the cover of Life to prove it’s Christmas 1950. Your New Favorite Writer is the boy at lower left, chin on hands.

That made twenty to twenty-five of us all celebrating Christmas in Grandma’s house. Gathered. Together. And the best part was: we all knew each other. We knew one another very well. We were kin. There’s hardly a better way of understanding love than gathering at Christmas.

“Fear not,” says the prophet Isaiah, “for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.” 

It’s a grand vision of gathering together, members of one tribe, one kindred. 

That’s what we did on those long-ago Christmases. Our tribe came together, at least those of us who could. We came from east and west and north and south and called one another by name. 

I did not know this fact at the time, but I know it now: It was not the toys that mattered most, nor the turkey and dressing and pie and cake. It was the coming together of the people. The spindly tree, illuminated by strings of gaudy colored lights over which Uncle Dick and Uncle Garrett and Uncle Earl had slaved for hours on the living room floor getting all the bulbs to light up at once, was the totem pole, the magnet that gathered the kin. 

Rice pudding with lingonberries. Fair use.

In my wife’s family it was much the same, only with a Swedish accent, because her mother’s folk were all Swedes, first- and second-generation Swedish Americans. So they had warm glögg with almonds and raisins in the bottoms of the cups; rice pudding with lingonberries; meatballs and gravy; limpa rye bread and dopp-i-gryta, the dipping of bread in fatty broth. But mostly with them, it was the people coming together, even if they were all Swedes except my wife’s father, who was Norsk.

The decades bring forth change. Families are smaller now. Folks tend to be more spread out, east and west, north and south. In our house this Christmas we will have Jo and me, my sister Cynda and her husband Steve, our daughter Katie and her children Elsie and Tristan (teenagers!). Plus Katie’s friend Valerie. Eight, all told. Still, it’s a coming together, a gathering. 

Most of us will attend our church’s Christmas Eve service. It’s a Congregational church, meaning the local congregation governs itself autonomously. Such a church is said to be a gathered church, that is, one formed by a process of kindred souls simply gathering together. And indeed it’s more like a family than like a formal institution. We’ll read the Scriptures and sing the carols and burn up a few candles in the process. But the main thing is, we’ll gather together.

We have within us the seeds of hate and the seeds of love. When we gather together around the Christmas tree or the communion table, we nurture the seeds of love and starve the other ones. 

Two greatly different realities are available to us in this world. I prefer the gathered one.

May you gather this season with whomever you have to gather with. And treasure the time, the place, and the gathering. It’s the best Christmas gift.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer