Columns

I was walking through the Rotunda of our state’s capital right before Christmas and heard a young boy ask his father if Abe Lincoln had a cell phone — true story.
“You see, in the old days people didn’t have mobile phones,” he began to explain.
I could not pause to hear the rest. I was too struck that my past had already become someone else’s history. The young boy had the same look on his face as I did when my parents had told me about how they grew up with no television. OMG, was all I could say.

Well we’ve made it to the season of “ahh.” The holidays are over and we start to settle back in to some kind of routine. Our days and nights are calmer. The decorations are back in their boxes and all the trash has finally been picked up. Now, we just have to get through winter.  

Americans are told that they face a “fiscal cliff” if automatic federal spending cuts and tax increases occur at the end of 2012. I’m not in favor of jumping off a cliff, but the logic of the supposed threat needs to be questioned.
The fiscal-cliff narrative assumes that spending cuts are bad for the economy. It follows, then, that more spending (and therefore more government debt) are good for the economy.

Perhaps the morning begins with the soft shuffling of socks tip-toeing down the stairs, drawn like pajama-clad moths to the Christmas tree glow.
Your Christmas morning may erupt with a bang, not a whimper, with excited screams and noisy rustle of wrapping paper torn and hastily set aside.
The holidays in the Downs family are more sedate these days, what with all of the formerly excitable children now grown-up and mature.  
We resign ourselves to making silly faces during our annual dreaded photo shoot in front of the Christmas tree.