Category Archives: Commentary

Wide-ranging observations from a skewed perspective

06.30.26
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Friends

I wish everybody could know my friends.

Laura reads every week’s blog post. Sometimes she comments, but always she reads them. Because they are great literature? Of course! Because she always learns something new from them? Naturally. But also—because she’s a friend. A dear friend, one of my dearest.

And there’s Ellen. She looks out for Laura—otherwise: disaster.

Bill, I have known for more than half my long life. He is a man of principle, a man of compassion—most of all, one of God’s most faithful representatives among the messy daily business of human life. Bill is as good a man as I could ever wish to be—but between you and me, I’ll never make it. That doesn’t matter to Bill. He loves me anyway.

I have a friend named Colleen. I knew her father, Bob, who was a great man. Colleen has many of Bob’s best qualities and wonderful ones of her own, including musicianship. She gives of herself and her talents unstintingly. She treats me almost as a spare father, because I was a younger colleague of Bob, who died too young. Colleen is special to me. 

Mike is another friend, one with whom we have traveled to England, the Netherlands, South Africa, and darkest Michigan. He is thoughtful, always well-spoken and well-informed. He is a talented organizer, a deeply committed Christian who often leads groups of young people in meaningful service projects that help out folks in difficult circunstances.

Let me tell you about my friend Greg, and my other friend Peter. They are middle-aged men, probably in their 50s, and lead healthy and vital New England churches. Wonderful guys.

I was talking with my friend Cynthia the other day and learned something I had not known—that years ago she was a military wife, stationed in Panama with her husband, Victor. That was back during the days of Operation Just Cause, when the U.S. was rounding up the dictator Noriega. Very exciting days. Thank God Victor and Cynthia didn’t get in the way of any lethal force. But that was years ago, and they’re in Christian ministry now. 

My friend Laura runs a very successful school for young students in Tijuana, Mexico. Her mother, Juana, was the previous head of the school. This dynamic young woman prepares hundreds of otherwise at-risk young people from poor neighborhoods for meaningful employment in the business arena and the arts. 

My new friend Ynes is a daughter of my recently deceased friend Charles. Charles, all by himself, started a mission school thirty years ago among the Baka people of the eastern part of Cameroon in Aftica. He and his school, now run by his former assistant Beatrice, give education, as well as breakfasts, lunches, clothing—even such a basic thing as registration of their births, which allows them to be citizens of their own land—to hundreds of young Cameroonians. Ynes is helping her father’s school cultivate supporting and sustaining relationships with American donors.

I wish you could know Beth. She is in her nineties now—recently remarried!—and gets around well for a woman her age. I’ve known her for years, known how generous she is for causes she believes in. But it was only last year I learned that in former days, she was one of the first woman pilots for Pan American World Airways. What a wonderful world!

Another friend, Ron, preached a sermon yesterday that would knock your socks off.

I could go on and on. These are only a fraction of the folks I encounter about once a year, occasionally more often, occasionally less often, by attending the meetings of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches—most of which, in the last forty years or so, my wife and I have attended. 

It’s a pretty good place to find friends who are not only good friends but good people. I am indebted to my faith tradition for giving me this richness of associations. I can only wish the same for you, Gentle Reader.

Perhaps you have noticed—no photos in this week’s blog. That’s because it never occurs to me to snap photos of my friends. I guess I know them well enough that I don’t need a physical image to see them. They’re in my head anytime I want them.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

06.23.26
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Seconds

Everybody loves a surprise, right? Surprises give that insouciant feeling of je ne sais quoi to life.

Surprises come in seconds. 

Last year in a hotel in Bloomington, Illinois, my legs turned to jelly under me. It happened in a second. I grabbed the bathroom sink counter and kept myself from falling on the floor. After a six-hour spinal fusion surgery and twelve weeks of recovery, I was good as new. Almost. 

All from a little surprise that lasted a few seconds. 

Last March 19, at 4:25 p.m., it was time to break off work and watch Jeopardy! I reached for the screen cover to close my laptop, and a great wave of dizziness engulfed me. The screen, with whatever I had written there, spun counterclockwise. I opened my eyes and everything was sideways. I was lying on my side on the floor next to my desk, not knowing what had happened. 

It all happened in a few seconds.

At the emergency room they asked me lots of questions, did a standard neurological exam (“How many fingers am I holding up? . . . Hold your hand up and keep me from pushing it down,” etc.), gave me a CAT scan and an electrocardiogram, and found . . . nothing in particular. “But these things don’t happen for no reason,” said the ER doc. “So I’m making you an appointment with the Faints and Falls Clinic, and I’m ordering a two-day Holter monitor for you.”

A Holter monitor, if you don’t know, is a gizmo they mount on your chest that keeps a continuous EKG record of your heart’s activity for a period of time, in this case, two days. But the two-day Holter showed no significant results, so they gave me a 14-day Holter monitor. Oh, bother. 

The 14-day Holter also showed nothing. So I have since had a cardiac recorder implanted in my chest to keep track of my impulses for the next three or four years.

But—have I mentioned?—this was not all academic. 

Since March 19, I have not driven a car, because you should not drive after an unexplained loss of consciousness. (“Syncope” with an un-silent e is what they call it, I learned at the emergency room.) The Motor Vehicle code says you should not resume driving until 90 days have gone by without a further episode of syncope. 

With all the Holter monitors, and an echocardiogram, and the time between appointments, it was getting close to 90 days since my only bout of syncope. I was ready to start driving again on the 90th day, June 17, five days after my birthday. I was even looking forward to it, because not being able to drive is a drag.

Did I mention my birthday was coming? So I went down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my license renewed. 

I couldn’t pass the vision test. That funny little box you look into at the Division of Motor Vehicles—I blew it. The first screen is just a line of type—block letters. Even though my glasses were on, I couldn’t even guess what the letters were. 

So I went to my eye doctor, and I think we’re going to get my license back, but in the meantime, it’s expired. 

It only took two or three seconds to fail the eye test. 

Recently we traveled to Boston. We arrived at Logan Airport, took the shuttle to the Blue Line “T” Station. My wife tripped over the entrance to the T Station and broke her arm in two places. We spent six hours in the ER at Massaachusetts General, a very good hospital.

It only took a second.

Another time measure that becomes relevant, at our time of life, besides the few seconds it takes to receive a new surprise, is the interval between surprises. It’s getting down to a few months, or even a few weeks.

We march on.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.12.26
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Out of the Ether

As a 1960s teen in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I took refuge in voices from the night. 

The glow of vacuum tubes. Image by Christopher Schirner. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The warm vacuum tubes in my small radio cast gleams through vents in the radio’s back, orangeing up the wall by my bed, as I harkened to heralds of tranquility, plucked from the ether, lulling me to sleep. 

Life was fraught: exacting teachers at school, crabby parents at home, classmates who always seemed to be cooler, more knowing, more confident—some actively hostile and others petty or dismissive. My days and evenings could be a mass of anxiety, hopped up by juke jive urging me to shake, rattle, and roll, consult my friend the witch doctor, and never dare step on anyone’s blue suede shoes. 

Then there was homework, a grind all its own. By ten o’clock, I was wrung out, ready for seductive sounds from the ether. 

“Ether?” I hear you cry. “What’s with all this ether, O New Favorite Writer? Are you telling us you were under anesthesia?”

Poster for 2014 scifi film The Came from the Ether. Fair use.

Not that kind of ether. Were I sedated, how could I be soothed any further by sounds coming from my radio? 

No, Gentle Reader. “Ether” is a long-discredited theory of physics that is still quite useful in talking about electromagnetic radiation. Radio, television, and radar travel through space as waves. But how can they travel if there is nothing to wave? In the ocean, waves are made of water. But in the wide reaches of the cosmos, there is only emptiness. So what is it, exactly, that waves? Simple: The ether, a nonsubstantial, non-existent substance that is everywhere but not anywhere. Radio waves ride it.

Our ether today is pierced by quadrigazillions of impulses careening around, each in its own tidy compartment, apt for reception if only one has the right equipment. It’s conceivable that all these invisible things lacing through our bodies at the speed of light might be unbalancing us.

But in those days of which I speak, every human on the planet did not have a pocketable telephone-cum-data center; there were only thirteen TV channels; and geosynchronous satellites blanketing the earth with their spoor existed only in the fevered imagination of Arthur C. Clarke. Most of what burdened the ether was just broadcast, amateur, and military radio signals, a bit of commercial TV, aviation-related radar, and telephone-related microwaves. Hardly anything at all.

Jay Andres. Photo from Speakingofradio.com. Fair use.

It was not too hard to pick out the dulcet tones of Jay Andres coming out of Chicago with “Music Till Dawn” on WBBM radio. Jay was urbane yet intimate. His voice conveyed friendliness with a kind of relaxed sophistication. He strung semi-classical, soft pop, and light jazz music together around loose verbal themes expounded with elegance. From time to time he spoke of the professional standards and sterling safety record of his sponsor, American Airlines. Before I ever took my first commercial flight, I was convinced down to my boot-tops that American was the plane to fly.

John Doremus. Behindthevoiceactors.com. Fair use.

The lilting, stringy, romance-tinged music, combined with the savoir-faire of our knowing host, helped me go into an untroubled, relaxing sleep.

Much the same could be said for John Doremus, with “Patterns in Music” on WMAQ. The same kind of thing, but a different voice—maybe a bit deeper and smoother than Jay’s, not quite as friendly and informal, but still a deep comfort. Worth listening to any night. 

These troubadors of the Midwestern ether played Tin Pan Alley standards, Broadway tunes, and a smattering of jazz—always in mellifluous instrumental renditions. They were high-grade professional announcers from radio’s heyday, whose plummy voices gave them large fan bases of their own. 

Franklyn MacCormack. From Discogs.com. Fair use.

You may think these late-night mood music programs were an odd attraction for a teenaged boy, but all I can say is, I liked them. They plucked chords in my soul. And if Jay Andres and John Doremus offered a trite or platitudinous form of radio entertainment—one could always tune to WGN and get the full treatment in the form of Franklyn MacCormack and “The All-Night Meister Brau Showcase.” 

MacCormack interspersed the usual tunes with romantic—nay, schmaltzy—poetry readings. His standard opening was: “Why do I love you? I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. . . ” intoned over Billy Vaughn’s weeping strings playing “Melody of Love.”  Franklyn purveyed reminiscences of old-time entertainers like Stoopnagle and Budd, as well as personal impressions of summer days at Wisconsin Dells as a guest of Tommy Bartlett. A perennial theme was the virtues of Meister Brau, a working-man’s beer from Chicago’s Peter Hand Brewing Company. “Meister Brau gives you more of what you drink beer for,” Franklyn would say. “It only tastes expensive.” 

An ad for Meister Brau. Public domain.

(Franklyn MacCormack was only his radio name, by the way. His real birth name was–get this–Franklin McCormick.)

While Jay Andres combined friendship with sophistication, and John Doremus delivered straight-from-the-shoulder baritone authority, Franklyn MacCormack sounded like a hale fellow well met. You could imagine him swilling a glass or two of his sponsor’s product while spinning records and looking up drippy poems to read. 

They were competitors, but all-night radio in Chicagoland was a small fraternity. A few months after MacCormack’s death in 1971, John Doremus took over his nocturnal duties at WGN, sponsored now by a savings bank, rather than a beer company. What listener would want to buy a round of suds for the buttoned-down Doremus?

I’m sure I was not the only teenaged boy listening to these soporific all-night deejays. Some of my college friends shared fond memories of them as well. In fact, at our college radio station, there was a kind of competition among several of us to see who could be the best Franklyn MacCormack. I did a program called “Music in the Night,” and—guess what?—I read poetry.

If you were not there, Dear Reader, you don’t know about it, but there was a sort of magic in the sounds and impressions that reached us late at night over the lightly-trod ether of the 1960s. Ethereal? Maybe. A lifeline? Definitely.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

04.21.26
by

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. 

#

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
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

02.17.26
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.

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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