When you’re walking back to the car, trying for all the world to look like you don’t really want all that much whatever item that has you out and about in your car, is when you begin the negotiations. So saith my father-in-law.

Some of the names were shocking. Others were anything but. We all knew about, or suspected, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi. But how many of us had any idea about players like Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Jerry Hairston?

On frustrating days, toting objects from one place to another, receiving and sending armloads of paper that will get pitched out, or standing on the college hilltop to watch massive tons of tractor-trailer cargo booming by in either direction—logs this way, planks that; goods this way, garbage that way—I sometimes conclude that the life of man could be reduced to the function of transporting molecules from here to there.

Just after I’d finished my pre-Christmas columns on “happiness,” Eknath Easwaran’s newsletter arrived from Blue Mountain.
Now here was a man who understood happiness, in his long and fruitful life. From his early years teaching English in California universities, he was fascinated by the human search for happiness that pervaded all the world’s literature, the great religious texts—and the American culture around him.

School Board member Dayton Owens got what he wanted.

I’m fairly certain Black Friday is why the terrorists and the French hate us. I can’t say for sure, since I don’t know any terrorists or French people on a first-name basis. But I doubt I miss my guess by far.

Tickets are still available for the U.S. Air Force Heritage of America Band Concert on Friday, Nov. 16, at 7 p.m. at the Wytheville Meeting Center. There is limited seating for the free event sponsored by the Wytheville Enterprise.

My father brought my sister a bike home in the back seat of the tan Oldsmobile when I wasn’t quite 5 years old.
She was 9 and I think it might have been her first bike. It was a girls bike, with a banana seat and little iridescent streamers poking from the handlebars.

It’s all the government’s fault.
Most of the time, hearing that all-too familiar cry, we cringe. We don’t necessarily believe that the government owes us anything or should provide us anything other than a few basic freedoms, such as the right to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances. The freedom to worship or not worship as we so choose. Those sorts of things. The government isn’t to blame when it does what it’s supposed to do. And there lies the problem.

I couldn’t finish my “autumn fire” series without airing some smoke on a topic that burns me up. That’d be the season’s campaign attack ads. If they’ve irritated you this year, wait till next.