He was calling from the police station and he was crying. We had a bad connection, but it sounded as if he were in some awful trouble up in Canada. He didn’t want me to tell his parents, just wire the bail money right away so he could get out of those handcuffs. I don’t know if that’s right, but he’s my grandson.

From Gazette editions of January, 1937:

News dispatches say that Hitler ordered all the German people to eat more fish. The implication is that Germans do not want to eat fish, but

The moon was an otherworldly blood orange Monday night as it lit a shimmering fuse along the waters off the Oak Bluffs town beach. It was so spectacular that nearly every car and truck pulled off the road so its inhabitants could stare . . . and reflect.

The year is 2008. Georgette drives the van from Montgomery to Selma on U.S. Route 80. As it leaves the city and heads through the country, the landscape surrounding the four lane highway opens up. Fields of cotton with big old trees lie on either side of us as Georgette grips the steering wheel.

“It’s quiet out here,” I say from the passenger seat. I’m used to the hustle and bustle of Montgomery.

“Yeah, it gets a little spooky out here sometimes,“ Georgette replies in her deep southern accent.

There was a time in America when debate mattered. It was a period when declamation was standard fare of a youngster’s education, when people knew about disputation and rhetoric and dialectics, when beyond a mastery of a subject, how one expressed an opinion, whether with wit or humor or insight, was important.