Category Archives: Commentary

Wide-ranging observations from a skewed perspective

04.21.26
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Numbers

I’ve been thinking about numbers. Not fancy numbers—just the ones we learned as toddlers.

Photo by Tanya Barrow on Unsplash.

“One” is a word for Unity. Wholeness. Perfection. Singularity. 

Once you say “Two,” you no longer have that perfection. You have traded in Singularity for Companionship. Fellowship. Relation. One is perfect and alone. But with Two, you can do the tango.

You have sacrificed insular perfection and gained a dyadic relationship. 

But note well: Embracing duality opens the door to plurality. 

It is inevitable: As soon as you have Two, Three comes marching in behind it, with a whole host of uninvited guests in its train. There is no end to the complexity you will encounter. You need a special symbol, ⚯, just to represent the embarrassing fact that there is no end. A through Ω no longer cover it. You need ⚯ as well.

I did not invent these ideas, Dear Reader. They have been expressed so often, for so long, that we may suspect they are hardwired into the human mind.

Lao Zi, the Daoist sage, may have had such things in mind when he opened his book, Dao De Jing, as follows: 

Lao Zi riding an ox. Painting by Zhang Lu (1464-1538). Public Domain.

The way which may be spoken of is not the Unchanging Way.

The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name. 

The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. 

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. . . . 

The Nameless is One; as soon as you name something, you have Two. And from these two, the Nameless and the named, come tumbling the myriad of other things.

Numbers are basic to Christianity as well. Long ago, formalizing a theological framework for the newly-acceptable religion, the bishops at the Council of Nicea asserted that God is one, “the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen.” 

But also, Jesus Christ is included, being “begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is . . . consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth.” 

So that’s two. 

The unique twist of this god-talk, from the first chapter of John’s gospel, is that even though God is two—the Father and the Son—yet the two are still one. Some people might call that mystical.

And, as most folks know, two was not enough. They had to make it three by including the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit—a being barely mentioned in the original version of the Nicene Creed but given more detail by the First Council of Constantinople a few decades later. So the One became the Three-in-One—a concept that has survived to this day, though never without challenge from dissenters.

Adoration of the Trinity, painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Father and Son upper center, with the Holy Spirit as a dove flying above them, and myriad beings surrounding them in adoration.

I do not mention all this, Gentle Reader, to start a theology debate. I only mean to point out the power that these simple numbers—one, two, three—have, and have always had, on our thinking. 

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Soon, Your New Favorite Writer will be eighty-one years old. Now, there’s a number to conjure with. Eighty-one is nine nines. And nine is magical because it’s three threes. The Trinity trined. 

Lao Zi had eighty-one chapters in his little book. One legend says he remained in his mother’s womb for eighty-one years before emerging as a full-grown, wrinkly old philosopher. I do not say this is true. I do say the number “eighty-one” carries a potency in the human mind. 

When a person gets to be eighty-one, he will have learned a few things, if he has been paying attention. But all of them—all the myriad things—come out of those first three numbers. They come from unity, duality, and the further possibility of pluralism. 

These are depths we cannot plumb. We must be content to deal, in our various ways, with all the ten thousand details. But, doing so, we might be relieved to reflect upon occasion that all these things are just extrapolations of more basic themes. 

One, Two, Three . . .  

But may your blessings be myriad, Dear Friend.

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.07.26
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Today’s Word: Disintermediate

Do you ever get the feeling that it’s all going down the drain? That indignity piled on absurdity piled on ignominy will soon culminate in the End of Things? That there is simply no hope for humanity? No point in keeping on?

I sometimes feel that way, too. When I do, it’s a sure sign I need to turn away from TV, from social media, from all that clutter. 

I spend time with my grandchildren, who are real people. I take my dog, a living quadruped, for a walk. I feel the air and smell the earth. 

For, Gentle Reader, there are two kinds of things in this world: Real things, and things you witness on screens. 

Fire. Photo by Fir0002, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Real things include soil, water, air, fire.

Cottontail rabbit. Image by Harvey Henkelmann, Public Domain.

Rabbits, automobiles, baseballs, muffins.

A baseball. Image by Httackne, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Fir trees, steel beams, clam chowder, toothache.

Real things are not all wonderful. But they are actual. They are authentic.

Screen things—media things—are stories, rumors, innuendoes, screeds. They are programs, livestreams, commercial announcements, candidate debates. They are strategies. They are  memes. They are panics. They are the news of the day. 

They may have some reality behind them, but not much of it. And what there is is curated, coiffed, filtered, teased, slanted. It is not the kind of reality that is in touch with your reality. It comes from a fabricated place. It comes via media.

If you’re losing hope, Dear Friend, I have one word for you.

Disintermediate. 

Go out in the real world, one on one. Just you and your experience; no third-party reporters, critics, summarists, AI bots, or commentators. Get rained on, get snowed on, get snowed in. Touch something made by God, not by an influencer. Steep yourself in actuality.

It will restore your confidence: not necessarily confidence in the future, but confidence at least in the solid present. 

“But, O New Favorite Writer,” you say, “even that may be a mirage, in the long run.” 

The long run?  I’m only here for the short run, and it’s getting shorter by the day. 

Stop. Smell the roses. 

This message brought to you by the Maker of Reality, through the medium of Your New Favorite Writer.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.31.26
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Crashing Crockery

The life of a Literary Lion is like that of the Spinning Plate Man who used to captivate me from time to time on The Ed Sullivan Show or other TV venues. 

The magic of spinning plates. Photo by Henrikbothe, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. 

Maybe you’ve seen this act, or some version of it: A guy sets dinner plates to spinning on willow rods mounted on a table. Just as he gets them all going, one of the plates loses momentum and starts to wobble, so he has to run over and rev it up again by wiggling the rod. By the time he does that, another plate is about to fall. He dashes hither and yon, frantic to keep all the plates a-spin.

The Payoff, the ultimate satisfaction of our intolerable suspense, is when a plate shatters on the stage floor. Even then, Our Hero is not licked. He takes out a fresh plate and gets it started just before zooming to the far end of the table to keep another from falling. He is the poster boy for dogged perseverance in the face of momentous odds.

And so is the serious writer. 

You must always be working on your new first draft. But you must also critique somebody else’s work; you must post your blog; you must polish a one-page synopsis to summarize your whole book for marketing purposes; you must go to a conference; you must get feedback on your first draft and make revisions; you must go to a craft fair and sell books. 

You dash here and dash there and keep everything going at once. 

But, sometimes, a plate crashes. That’s what happened at this address last week, Dear Reader. 

I failed to post a new blog, so you saw the same post two weeks in a row. 

Here is my mea culpa: I had a medical event the week before. 

On Thursday afternoon, March 19, while working on Major Important Literary Things, I was suddenly swamped by dizziness, lost consciousness, and fell from my chair to the floor. 

Aside from a goose egg on my forehead, I was unharmed. But Google told me to go to the Emergency Room, so I went. They did an EKG, a CAT scan, some stat blood work, and the usual neurological tests but found nothing amiss. 

That in itself was unsettling. Something must have caused this event. So they scheduled some followup tests.

As a result, my life these days is punctuated with trips to high-class medical facilities for different kinds of cardiac monitoring. Also, my wife or a friend must chauffeur me everywhere—because, what if the same thing happened again, while I was driving? 

The results trickle in, day by day, and pool around my feet. Yet so far, no doctor has put them together into a specific diagnosis. That kind of gnosis is hoped for in the near future.

MEANWHILE, Gentle Reader, life goes on. I heard from my highly-trusted advisor, the stellar Christine DeSmet, that she likes my new first draft (working title: Hard Feelings). It’s good that she agrees with me about that. I had hoped she would. It means there are only half a million small improvements that need to be made. You should see it in print in a year or two.

And here, somewhat late, is a new post—flogging this lame excuse, which is all I’ve got in my bag right now. I’ll try to have something better next week, Fair Reader. 

Meanwhile, prayers and all good wishes gratefully accepted.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.03.26
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Look at all we’ve gained. 

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

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.17.26
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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.

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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

01.20.26
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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
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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

12.23.25
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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

12.16.25
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Reclining Angel

For decades, she flew flatwise across the vertical top of our yearly Christmas tree—be it pine, balsam, or spruce. 

Some people place a star on their tree—to represent the Star of Bethlehem, I suppose. Others place an angel. Most of the angels, like the stars, are built in vertical format, the better to occupy the top of the tree, which is usually a single evergreen spear, jutting toward the ceiling. 

But our poor little angel, I’ve never known her name, was made in such a way she could only lie horizontally. We hung her from the vertical top branch, but she lay sprawled across its middle, resisting all upward tendency.

There is something to be said for the horizontal. When Your New Favorite Writer studied the photographic arts, he learned that horizontal lines and shapes suggest calm, tranquility, rest, repose. If you want to show strength, go for the vertical. For drama, diagonal lines and swirly shapes are great. But horizontal composition speaks of peace.

We stopped buying cut trees at some point a few years ago—maybe the forty-dollar point. Instead, we trimmed our potted Norfolk Island pine for Christmas. 

The Norfolk pine lives outdoors in spring, summer, and fall. At the end of all that warmth, we huff and puff and carry the big tub with its delicate little tree indoors. Originating on Norfolk Island, it would never survive a Wisconsin winter.

Norfolk Island, in case you’re wondering, is nowhere near the same-named city in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Rather, it’s an external territory of Australia, located in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia. Its namesake pine, Araucaria heterophylla in case you’re interested, is not a true pine but a closer relative of the hoop pine and the monkey-puzzle tree. In other words, a subtropical specimen.

It’s a pretty, willowy plant with short-bristled branches that droop as they get longer. You can’t hang heavy ornaments on it, or the branches will droop more than they already do. 

Our little angel, a real lightweight, qualifies for the top of the Norfolk pine. We used to hang her on the upward-pointing spear, just as we did with our cut trees in prior years.

This year, however, is different. The Norfolk pine grew too tall to be brought in through the door. My wife, anticipating this problem, cut off its top in the spring. The little tree, in a touching burst of cooperation, grew replacement branches horizontally. So now, instead of a vertical spike on top, we have a horizontal bed of interlocking branches. 

Just the right place for our little angel’s true vocation, which rhymes with fiesta.

Something about that seems to fit the peace message of the season.

Sleep well, sweet angel; and flights of pine boughs loft thee to thy rest.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

12.09.25
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Young Men With Beards

Detail from Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642. Public Domain.

. . . Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. . . .

—Shakespeare, “The Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It

Young men with beards think they can fix everything for us.

Not long ago, clean-shaven young men thought they could fix everything for us.

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Well, STOP THE PRESSES, Dear Reader, because I’ve got a news bulletin: Everything is not fixed. 

They’ve worked at it and worked at it and fought fiercely for their constituents and—guess what?—the only part they left out was the fixing of everything.

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Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be endured.

As to those things that can be fixed, we’ve mostly got to do it ourselves. 

To imagine that politicians will fix everything—or would, if not thwarted by opposing, evil, politicians—is arrestingly naïve.

If politicians solved more problems than they create, we’d run out of problems. 

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Of course we must have politicians, to divide the spoils among us and administer our public institutions. But Politics holds no key to a New Jerusalem where streets are paved in gold and teardrops never fall.

Here’s the fact of it: We are all in this together, Dear Friend: All broken, jumbled, confused creatures muddling our way through swamps of untoward circumstance.

Swamps of untoward circumstance . . . Paul Klee, The Man of Confusion, 1939. Public Domain.

Each of us gets one life, and it’s altogether imperfect. We are mixed creatures. Our lives are spotted, blotted, their meanings and messages obscure. 

Perhaps God could have made us perfect—but at what cost to our souls?

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Beware the temper that looks to some hero to come along and straighten it all out. 

Making idols of the prominent, or of the adamant, leads us to loathe our neighbors. Hatred and suspicion of those we live with is the worst form of hell on earth.

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It might be better just to relax. 

Resolve to enjoy what life throws at you, pain and pleasure together, weal and woe alike. Do what good you can, when you can. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.

This—right here, right now—is your chance to witness the grand spectacle of human existence from a front-row seat, and it will be over before you know it.

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Just a few random thoughts, Gentle Reader.

I’ll be back up to subnormal by next week.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer