In Plain Engel-ish

When my dad came over from Hungary in 1922, at age 11, he knew virtually no English but learned it quickly, as children do. He loved movies, and since they were all silent films, he would practice reading English from their title cards, which contained all the dialogue. The first movie he ever saw in America was Nanook Of The North, which came out that same year. It was the first documentary film ever made and is still hailed as a true classic. And so all things Eskimo were big in the Engel household. I remember getting a Golden Book...

Bernard Jordan thought he was one lucky Frenchman. An aristocrat, he had been appointed by the king to one of the cushiest jobs in the country. He was put in charge of only seven men who were residing in what had once been, since 1350, a teeming royal prison for the multitude of high-born nobles who had somehow offended the king. Now there were only these seven older gentlemen left residing within the enormous structure. It was used mostly as an armory for storing weapons. Jordan was presiding over what was a virtually empty old folks home, which the king...

At my age, I have been spending more and more time contemplating The Hereafter. I can’t even count the number of times I find myself walking into a room and then just standing there, thinking: “Now what did I come in Hereafter?”   For those of us who have surpassed the Biblical age of “Three-Score and Ten,” I think we are so thankful for having lived a long life that we take pride in occasionally forgetting the tiny, less important domestic details, due to the fact that our memories are already overcrowded with all the important stuff. That’s my story, anyway,...

Thinking back on why I became the type of English professor I did, I remember my fourth grade teacher, Mrs Yount. She was a great influence on encouraging  my ultimate profession — but only indirectly. In fact, when I was in her class I had already decided on my future career, and it most certainly was not going to be in the teaching profession. No, my ten-year-old self was definitely going to grow up to be a physician. Was it an early love of medicine? Hardly. I bowed to no one in my dread of Dr. Souter, my pediatrician. She...

I was not obsessed with dinosaurs as a young child, but I was definitely impressed with them. I remember seeing all the drawings in books and being astounded at how enormous and powerful they were. Since Mom and Dad, from my six-year-old perspective, also seemed huge and all-powerful, it was unsettling to know that dinosaurs had them beat by a mile on both counts. And I was wowed that dinosaurs roamed the earth a hundred years ago. Well, it turns out that it was closer to 164 million years ago, but to a kid, anything that happened before your grandparents...