Edwin Alexander Hawley, Captain, Air Force Date of Loss: 17 February 1972 Country of Loss: North Vietnam Date of release: 12 February, 1973 It’s not just a statistic. I wore a stainless steel bracelet with Edwin Hawley’s name on it for months. I was a junior at Mountain Brook High School when I put that…
This year is our 40th high school class reunion. I’ve lived out of state most of the time since graduating from high school and have never attended a class reunion. We have an open Facebook group called Mountain Brook High School 1974. Somebody added me to the group and I started getting notifications about posts…
Hang on, isn’t that supposed to be “The Sound of Music?” OK, that too! Bach’s Saint John Passion epitomizes Easter for me. Accordingly, on Easter Day, I went looking for my recording of the work. Oh bother, it was on the external drive on which I had backed up my data before reimaging my machine….
For two years we got to live in a house on Frenchmans Bay in Maine. The house was nothing special but the location was magical. The sun and moon rose across the bay. To the right were Mount Desert Island and the mountains of Acadia National Park. And the water of the bay, always there,…
I am posting the below with permission of the author, Billy Bromberg. As a result of this post my husband Jim and I have become aware of a suicide prevention group that is meeting in Crestline this evening at 5:30. The meeting is in the Mountain Brook City Hall building and will last until 7:00….
“United States National Cemetery” is a designation for 147 nationally important cemeteries in the United States . . . The most well-known is Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. –From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United States National Cemetery. That number now stands at 148. On Monday, February 17th, a new National Cemetery was dedicated in Montevallo,…
Birmingham under siege Written late at night on Tuesday, January 28th.) Birmingham Alabama, USA received a completely unexpected snow storm today. At around 8:30 a co-worker asked if I knew it was snowing. I wasn’t worried about it. The forecast had called for little to no accumulation. I worked steadily for a couple of hours…
The faculty of the brass section of the Juilliard School of Music arrived in Bar Harbor and we got to work. It was December of 2001. During rehearsals we discovered that these guys are talented, yes, but they were also regular people. We all made mistakes in the beginning and there was a lot of…
A brown and white stuffed animal, a pony, was beneath the Christmas tree. It had a red ribbon tied around its neck. I was seven years old. Puzzled, I hurried to the tree where I knelt and took the stuffed pony in my hands. There was a gaily colored card tied to the red ribbon….
It was exactly this time of year, 31 years ago, that I put a loaded gun to my head and pulled the trigger. Many people find that they are depressed during this time of year. I’ll leave the formal explanations to mental health professionals. I know only my own experience. In the United States,…