Author: thecolumnrule

ST. PATRICK’S, A DAY FOR TEA SURELY

March 17, 2024 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      You cannot have the Irish without tea. When the person holds a cup, it is the soul that comes to visit, both to nourish and to be nourished. Every sadness, every joy, every birth, every passing, every harvest, every leaving home of a once […]

SAM’S HICCUPS

March 10, 2024 By Arthur H. Gunther III (From an earlier essay, when a grandson was much younger.) Had a conversation with a young fellow at a train station in chilly, windy weather when the topic turned to hiccups since that was what the 3.5-year-old was using for punctuation in what otherwise was rapid-fire language. […]

…—…

March 3, 2024 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      We all have rhythm – in the way we talk, walk, move. There is rhythm in the workplace – keyboards, factory machines, assembly lines, construction crews. There is rhythm in religious services, certainly in music. And then there was rhythm in Morse Code, International […]

A FARMER’S FRIEND

February 25, 2024 By Arthur H.Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      In another time, in another Rockland County, N.Y., when the rural season was year-round save for perhaps eight weeks as summer vacationers tarried, barns stood proud as do tall majestic oaks and redwoods and pines. They proclaimed hard work, land cleared for grazing, farming, dairy.  […]

THE BOOK IS NOT A LONELY HUNTER

February 18, 2024 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      A gift – a find from the Tappan Zee Thrift Shop in little Piermont, N.Y. – brought renewed life to a small book on art and painting by Winston Churchill, himself an artist beyond British prime minister, statesman and author of very serious and […]

SILENCE

February 11, 2024      Silence is the pull-over spot in life, that second which becomes a moment and then even an hour or so when you idle and say nothing, perhaps do nothing but stare, let yourself drift away. No one else is needed; you are self-sufficient, with  strength, confidence, respect, reliability, even survival. […]

GET YER NEWS! ‘NOISE’ IN THE CITY

February 4, 2024 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      It used to be that the smog from coal furnaces and smokestack industry defined cities, along with dark alleys and film noir scenes, but with the urban renaissance, things now are much more in vibrant color rather than black and white. There has always been […]

‘IT’S MINE’

January 28, 2024 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      We are all possessive – of things, people, places, memories, even coffee cups. Java tastes different in a vessel not of favorite fancy. It’s like being with pleasurable company, but not the same crowd – something is missing, though the brew is appreciated.   […]

THE JACKET

January 14, 2024 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There aren’t many moments perhaps when you put on a fall jacket, even in winter or spring or the occasional cool summer morning that you do not think of when another such covering  was borrowed.      That jacket may be long gone as […]

‘LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW …’

January 7, 2024 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com There is snow, and there is snow. All relative to where you live and how each storm compares to the previous one. Like life. In my region of the globe, what we used to call “upstate New York” until the downstate from Battery Park on up […]

WHY ART?

December 31, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      With the new year – 2024! – upon us and the hope that humanism will again push aside the withering worldwide, nationwide, even at points local, we turn to the artists everywhere, heralded and largely undiscovered who have ties to souls gone, here, in […]

‘NATURE’S DIAMONDS’

(Gunther photo) December 17, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com       Early ice is relative in this part of the world – Harriman State Park, about 25 miles from the ever-hot glow of Times Square. Climate change has moved up the date, and we would normally have snow by this time, so […]

OF LIGHT AND DARK

December 10, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Gunther photo There probably isn’t a unflattering photograph, sketch, watercolor, pastel or oil painting of the Nyack, N.Y., birthplace home of Edward Hopper, the American artist. Until at least the one that accompanies this essay.      And not because I took it. I […]

BACK IN THE DAY

December 3, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      December 3, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Newspapers are – were – inimitable in our existence for my father and grandfather and seemingly the world, from donut-dunkers on diner stools to Gotham subway straphangers to the lady at home in […]

OPEN BOOK

‘ILLUMINATION AT THE DOOR’/ gunther November 12, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      This is a “mad-as-hell” painting. Forget the style, the competence of the artist. Just – please – look at the doorway to what is your usual, time-honored, cherished, musty-scented, treasure trove of a corner bookshop. Or one in the […]

THE DIAPHANOUS CURTAIN

October 29, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There is – can be – a moment lying in an old iron bed of the very early 1900s, mattress high off the wooden floor, fall morning after a sneaked-in summer-style night, when a whiff of the autumn chase comes to say hello. It […]

WAXING ON WAXED PAPER

October 22, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Back in ancient history but certainly relevant to today’s school kids, at least half the morning instruction in the lower/middle grades was given less attention because all you could think about was lunch. The other half was spent in standard day-dreaming.      Take-to-school […]

BUBBE WEISMAN’S WISDOM

October 15, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      My brother and I, raised in the 1940s-’50s country village of Spring Valley, N.Y., and our father before that in the 1930s, had many, sometimes mostly, Jewish classmates and friends. Their parents were the local merchants, teachers, physicians, lawyers, garagemen. The Valley was also […]

A CONCKLIN LEGACY/ More than Family History

October 7, 2023   By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Family genealogy collections and books are cherished histories that connect the dots in ancestral lines and prove reference for future generations. We should know where we come from.      But when someone researches and toils for a very long time – a […]

FORMATIVE TIMES

October 2, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      If we are fortunate, and not all are, we are anchored by early, good memories that literally define life, provide confident reference to the past and offer reassurance with a laugh or two.      For me, recognizable life – my awareness – began […]

‘FORM’

‘HER’/gunther (acrylic on linen) September 24, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Form is the substance of life, whether it be our homes, places we visit, the food we eat, the beauty we admire and that which we do not; it is our bodies, perhaps our souls.      Admiration, indifference, no […]

IDLING

‘TWO WINDOWS’/gunther September 17, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      In a day’s time, you can sit in a room in thought that is idling like your 1955 English Ford in neutral, the constant turn of the engine pistons reassuring that you can just molt a bit. We all need to be […]

MISSION UNDERSCORCED

September 11, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There is rhythm to our lives, and when it is seriously interrupted, the beat rarely returns to the same music.  And, so it was with September 11, 2001.      When 9/11 hit in terroristic horror 22 years ago, I was at the former […]

THE AMERICAN WORKER

Sept. 5, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther IIIthecolumnrule.com      This is crazy time in America in ways political, economic, health-wise, socially, though if you subscribe to the thought that things happen for a reason, maybe eventually we will learn why. But Labor Day is supposed to be free of deep thinking, so I guess […]

AWAITING SEASONAL ‘LOVE’ August 27, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com A peach in season is like long-sought-after love that suddenly makes connection.  The heavens appear, but as in many a novel and short story, consumption does you in, spoils you for the ordinary. You can love no more past this time. Until the […]

BERT HUGHES

    August 20, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com From time to time but never often enough, there come among us in a world of ego, greed, power, selfishness, those extraordinary individuals who give from the core of their being because their principal god is the goodness of humanity. Such a person was Bert […]

A PASSING FACE

August 13, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There comes a day when you see a certain face, on a relative, friend or former acquaintance, and you realize time has passed, that age has added lines, that days of happiness, difficulty, excitement, boredom and the sometime ordinariness of living have left telltale […]

TWO WASHINGTONS

August 6, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com WASHINGTON, D.C. – These are not the best of days for America’s capital and Capitol, indeed the seat of democracy worldwide. A thrice-indicted fellow who should never have been president, special interests, the money lobbies, overwhelming bureaucracy and way too many rules and regulations pervert this […]

DOING THE JOB

July 30, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III  thecolumnrule.com      Exceptional people have always been, but today’s busyness and the strains and demands of growth can hide these folk. Two such individuals from another time come to mind in my area of Rockland County, N.Y.      One is Sterling Theis, who was the […]

PATHS TAKEN

July 23, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt. – Naturalist John Muir.      From the earliest days living in a semi-rural New York county not far from Gotham but a great distance from that life, dirt paths crossed […]

‘THE HUMAN TOUCH FELT’

July 16, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There was a recent social media short of the type that would have made a full feature story back when we were not losing two newspapers a week. It was about a fellow in Massachusetts who passed away in his early 90s, just months […]

THE COOLING EFFECT

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      These are the dog days of August even though it is not the seventh month. The world seems on fire, with temperatures in many places soaring above 110, almost biblical in prediction. The science says “progress,” from the discovery of fire into the Industrial Age, the Automotive […]

MOOING IN THE BURBS

July 2, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Recently, in my suburban, now partially urban/suburban part of “upstate New York,” just 20 miles from the Big City, a local police department marveled at cows moseying on once-rural roads and grazing on a development house lawn. But why not? They were there first. […]

‘WHAT’S IN A FACE?’

June 25, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      What’s in a face?      One of the good moments provided by the yin and the yang of the Internet and social media is the republishing or first-time showing of photographs made by the brilliant documentarians who worked with the Farm Security Administration […]

DELIVERING ‘DEMOCRACY’

June 18, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Every profession has its “holy mission,” its reason for being. The brother/sisterhood involved are family that get the work done, almost always in net pride. We can all complain in the daily task about bosses, work loads, unfairness, but this is in family too, […]

‘GO FORTH!’

June 11, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      This is school graduation time – high school, college – and across the nation, across the globe, those who are fortunate to have had chances at learning are moving on to other moments, all relative to who they are, where they live, what advantages […]

COINCIDENCE?

COINCIDENCE? June 4, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There is every coincidence in life, whether by the gods, by seemingly directed unconscious thoughts, perhaps just by the mere of it all. But it happens.      You are reading a story about, say, a new dam in 1930s’ Colorado, and that […]

GIFT OF THE FALLEN

GIFT OF THE FALLEN Memorial Day Weekend By Arthur H. Gunther IIIthecolumnrule.com The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached via ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay is adapted from a first version.

NOT EMPTY

May 21, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      These essays are usually written in stillness, a completely quiet time when the spring birds are tuning up in early morning or the coffee pot is percolating its gathering scent in a colder moment.      Stillness is a gift that insulates you from […]

STILLNESS

May 14, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      These essays are usually written in stillness, a completely quiet time when the spring birds are tuning up in early morning or the coffee pot is percolating its gathering scent in a colder moment.      Stillness is a gift that insulates you from […]

‘GOLDMINE’ AWAITS

GOLDMINE By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      An artist’s painting is in the eye of the beholder, but the language is from the maker, and though the viewer may know some of the words, even sentences, the full narrative is the creator’s. The viewer can miss all of that for lack of interest […]

THE AIRPORT BENCH

April 30, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Would that there be equality for all, that every little kid would have a Friday afternoon dream spot, a haven where after school he/she/they could leave the present and get lost in a mixture of the past, future and fantasy.      Such chill […]

ONCE, AT THE CAPE

April 24, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Time was when the family used to visit old Cape Cod for a summer two weeks, but as children morphed into adults with their own kids, and as the years and the money-elite changed too much of that New England landscape from a largely […]

HER SOUL

April 16, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      As a newspaper photographer, my images ranged from publicity to fires to politics to sports and other subjects. Now as a painter, I work in abstract, realism, abstract realism and primitive. In photographs and canvas I have tried to depict the essence of people, […]

SAVE THE CHILDREN

Updated electrical code  can prevent fatal fires April 9, 2023  By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Remember your mom’s warning not to stick paper clips in electrical outlets? Saved lives. Today it seems some, hopefully few, in government in effect tell kids and adults to plug anything into a circuit. Not by intent […]

OUR REPORTER

April 2, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com The daily birth of a newspaper is a wondrous thing, with news, commentary, photographs, the who, what, where, when, why and how of information light and heavy and everywhere in between. Each edition is from sweat and muscle and emotion held back in required detachment. It […]

GRAIN OF SALT

March 26, 2023  By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      In a world of super haba-daba lattes, designer donuts at $4.50 and your name written on the coffee container that you must pick up at another counter, it was reaffirming when this morning I reached for the salt shaker.  It was plain Joe, plain […]

OPTIMISM

March 19, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There is indisputable evidence that despite each older generation claiming  the young are going to hell in a hand basket, the truth is otherwise. Always has been.       Greed is in every generation. Some bad politicians are as well. Some “leaders” fail. Some […]

THE OLD POST OFFICE

March 12, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com In a very simple time when things were still complicated for grown-ups of course, country children of the 1940s and ’50s found diversion in rustling through the woods, playing hide and seek with other kids and going on small errands with dad or mom. Absent the […]

MY TIME

‘OFF THE SOUTH MOUNTAIN’/gunther March 6, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      On an early morning run in the Northeast, about 6, before the suburban/urban beings start their engines and rev up for the endless trips to shopping strips, the time is mine, and I relish the nearly empty roads and the […]

HAPPY TO HELP

February 26, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      The daughter of a Rockland Journal-News colleague from long ago when the community newspaper still existed at 53 Hudson Ave., Nyack, N.Y., recently sent me an unidentified photograph of her as a very young child, taken in the newsroom. Her mother is gone now, […]

THE ANNUAL VISIT

February 19, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There was always anticipation in the 1939 Dodge my father drove to the ferries at Weehawken to begin our rare visits to New York City. A country boy living just 18 miles away, a walk in the fields was the usual day, not shivering […]

‘GOTHAM ABSTRACT’

February 12, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There is mystery in Gotham, the generic word for any city, ancient or modern. Tall buildings dwarfing others, alleyways in daylight darkness, corners in street lamp shadow, anonymous individuals plugged into crowds on sidewalks almost never left untrod. Urban life is its own mojo, […]

POWER OF LANGUAGE

February 5, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      James Joyce, the writer who had to leave Dublin to narrate its soul, is remembered for more than classic works like “Dubliner” and Ulysses.” His story and character quotes are almost unbelievable pull-outs from the recesses of our minds.      “Shut your eyes […]

STILLNESS

January 29, 2023  By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Despite the rotation, a doorknob has stillness. You may have gone on a trip, and the handle has not been turned. You will do so, and the great feeling of home will hit, no matter how fine the journey has been. Maybe this isn’t […]

UNFINISHED STORIES

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      “Unfinished Story,” the title of this painting inspired by an old doorway on Piermont Avenue in the Hudson River village, speaks for itself. We all have unfinished stories.      When I spotted the doorway in Piermont, N.Y., once a railroad town, then a factory town and […]

OF A QUIET EVENING

January 15, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      For someone like my grandfather Arthur Sr., the Information Age began in his 20s with a flood of great daily New York City newspapers like The World, the New York Times and the New York Daily News. He also had a crystal radio set, […]

TETHERED

January 9, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There is this thing about a woman in the early morning holding her hands around a warm, even mildly hot cup of java or tea. In conversation or not, there is an anchor, and whatever her thoughts, the tether’s for a reason.      […]

BE KIND

January 1, 2023 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      This is the traditional make-resolutions day, the get-fit, renew-yourself makeover start. Sometimes some of us actually do that. I’m still compiling a list from the January Ones of long ago.      Most of us have good intentions. We do want to improve, to […]

MESSAGE AT CHRISTMAS

     December 25, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther IV      For some years, my son Arthur IV, a writer too, has offered a holiday story published in this space. Reprinted here is one of my favorites from some years back – AHG III.      Franklin was a man of routine. Perhaps such […]

OLD IS NEW

December 18, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      There’s this thing about radiators. Not long ago they were old-fashioned but are now in vogue with home renovators overpaying scrap dealers. They are unheard of in many parts of the nation that don’t need central heating. And they were once a best […]

THE GUNTHER BOYS

December 9, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      Your younger sibling should not pass before you do, though my brother Craig William Gunther always appeared as the older one. He was handsome with blond hair and blue eyes, a different look in a family of brown tops and eyes. He was […]

A FELLOW’S MORNING

December 4, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      More or less at 6:15 a.m., an older fellow moves across Western Highway in Blauvelt, N.Y., to a small grocery where contractors, refuse collectors, DPW workers and other musicians in the band that keeps daily life moving gather for the quick morning coffee, […]

THE FINKELSTEIN

November 27, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      You walked out the door not as a different person but with an added layer, as if you had visited a kindly elder who told you what you did not know. You had more chops.      That was often the experience in […]

‘OUT OF SORTS’

November 20, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      There is a hot-metal printer’s expression – “running out of sorts” – which means the typesetting supply of a particular letter, punctuation, character, etc., is low. In civilian terms, if we don’t feel 100 percent, we are out of sorts. An apt comment […]

IT’S LIFE

November 15, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      These virus-changed days have many office workers toiling at home in PJs, unlike the cubicles of 2020 and, blessedly before that regimented isolation, the large open room filled with desks, in turn overflowing with individual collections of paper, coffee cups, stick-it notes, Rolodexes […]

FOR ELECTION DAY 2022

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      A long-ago story, Election Day 2022 relevant.       In spring 1960, the General Organization of Spring Valley High School (N.Y.) held its presidential election for the next school year. There were two candidates, both capable of filling the student government office. One was more popular […]

AT THE WINDOW

October 30, 2022_  By Arthur H.Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      Our America, at times wonderful to the point of tears – emotional, caring, giving – is also in its citizens’ fear as mean as can be – from want, loss, uncertainty in great and challenging change. We then fall back on  the temptation that […]

THE PORTRAIT

October 23, 2022 By Arthur H.Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      A face is the door to someone’s being, the eyes the hallway to the soul. It can be a journey never forgotten.      As a photographer – I was on staff for a newspaper – while the job ends, the skills do not […]

AMERICAN STORY

October 17, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      America needs a good story, from sea to shining sea, in the hustings, in the gothams, on the farms, in the mountains and valleys, in the panhandle and among the poor, the rich, the in-between, the Republican, the Democrat, the independent, among all […]

THEY ‘SUNG’ FOR US

October 9, 2022  By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      There is no workplace rhythm – this necessary, life-sustaining tempo, this melody, this song – without the interplay of people. Bosses, the ordinary grunts, specialists, the guys and gals who do the job, or who do the job better than others, the slackers, […]

TRUST

October 2, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      A fall ride in early evening on a wooded parkland drive when the quiet is uninterrupted, when the moon is full and car lights seem unnecessary, when the engine purrs in low revolution, when the conversation between two is also at momentary idle, […]

‘WE WALK TOGETHER’

September 18, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      In a September-near-fall when colored leaves drop in nostalgic scent, some of us can forget the crazy world of war, death, climate, challenged democracy. Some don’t have the luxury since they are caught up in what is not working, what is frightening.    […]

TO NEVER FORGET

September 11, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com There is rhythm to our lives, and when it is seriously interrupted, the beat changes forever. And so it was with September 11, 2001. When  9/11 hit in terroristic horror 21 years ago, I was in the West Nyack newsroom of the former Rockland Journal-News, […]

LABOR DAY EXAMPLE

September 4, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com On this Labor Day of late sleeping, barbecues, beach trips and general laziness for many but the same-old, same-old for those who are not “honored” but must toil, a memory trip back 123 years ago recalls a man, Hugh Bonner, who created an example of […]

CUPCAKES: ‘ANTIDOTE’?

August 28, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      There are in this life moments when you need a cupcake. Down day, low energy or maybe you just want to celebrate breathing. Back in the day, my father, who did the grocery shopping in a two-worker family, usually bought a weekly supply […]

RED LIGHT FOR ALL

  August 21, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      For many decades, from the very first automobiles, when horse-drawn wagons and carriages were still about, there was a right-turn path at a stoplight intersection in a little hamlet not far from me. It seemed to offend no one; I can recall […]

THE STASH

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com     With recent early-morning temperatures hitting numbers not seen in months and with – hopefully – no more awful heat waves in sight, our house furnaces and boilers will soon be ready to kick in. For me, the change involves more than a turn of the thermostat […]

THE HEAT

August 7, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com The rule of thumb is that the dog days of August are to be endured, that autumn will bring relief along with the wondrous color of falling leaves. But all this is hooey if August is also June and July, September too. At least in […]

‘IRISH PHILOSOPHY’

July 31, 2022 By Arthur H.Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      The Irish lady from North County Dublin looked less than chipper, unusual for this get-it-done woman with a sharp sense of right and wrong and a non-nonsense approach to living. She was in the later years, not “old” yet by her definition but past […]

A ‘SOUND’ MEMORY

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      If you are fortunate before you grow up, you’ll get to spend a few years with a patient, somewhat quiet, a bit odd grandfather like I did, who had a knack for fixing almost anything with a pocketknife or a squirt of oil from the old-style […]

‘NIGHT CARPENTER’

July 17, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com Doors have a way of fitting in, just like long-gone Uncle Jack in town for a comfy visit. He gets that way fast. Or people who initially stand out and are somehow morphed into the crowd, hopefully adding to the whole. It’s as if the […]

GOING ‘HOME’

July 10, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      ANY VILLAGE, USA — Times change, people do, communities certainly. “You can’t go home again,” literally, as Thomas Wolfe put it. Yet, the pull of one’s childhood place is mighty strong, despite the “better” land you may now live in, some memories you […]

THE REPUBLIC

July 4, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com       We eat picnic food, watch fireworks and chill out on July 4th in the national birthday celebration recognizing Independence Day, our 1776 Declaration of Independence from Great Britain over growing oppression and denial of human rights. The American experiment had begun. Our […]

BEGINNINGS

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      Not all essay writing comes in full paragraphs – sometimes the thought begins in shorthand. Perhaps a form of poetry, or if not to the expected quality level of such, a collection of thoughts worthy enough if the reader cares to nibble. Some such fodder: WOODS, […]

LAYERS OF HISTORY

June 19, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      You don’t have to dig into eons past to see history.      A road beautification project in Pearl River, N.Y., a hamlet in the Gotham suburbs but in the country when I was young, has modern planners trying to “calm traffic,” as […]

WE NEED A HOEDOWN

June 12, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      When in the course of human events these United States, still in experimentation, requires a reset, it is necessary to have a big do – a block party, a hoedown, a hayride under a strawberry moon. Everyone invited, especially the prejudiced.      […]

EDWARD HOPPER IN NYACK

June 5, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      NYACK, N.Y. — Edward Hopper, famed painter of realism whose “Nighthawks” and other works articulate American solitude as mood, thought and destiny,  is ever-present in this village of his 1882 birth.      Hopper House, operating as an art gallery, museum and study center […]

THE FALLEN SPEAK

May 30, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com       No Memorial Day, USA or elsewhere, is without heartfelt words and tribute, parades, wreaths, re-mourning. What is always missing, though, are the voices of the fallen. Would that we could hear them. What would they say?      “Mom, I was as scared […]

A SIMPLE (OR NOT) REPAIR

May 22, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      We live in an age of power tools, big-box home improvement centers and a throwaway culture, so when a leaning fence gate needs fixing, the modus operandi may well be to (1) buy a super-duper, lithium-powered hammer drill from the big box store […]

PLUMS IN SEASON

May 15, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com Once upon a time – this seems a fairy tale of sorts – a 14-year-old youngster with a huge quarter in his pocket – more money than he touched in an average year – found himself in a sudden heavy June downpour on a village […]

EDUCATOR

May 8, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      In the Spring Valley, N.Y., breakfast program, those volunteers retired come from every former vocation – professional, blue-collar, high-finance, the trades, at home, etc. And we bring our workplace habits with us.      For example, the late Bob Drennen, once longtime principal […]

OF NECESSITY

May 1, 2022 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      Years ago, decades actually, this once young man watched as an older fellow carefully straightened bent nails taken from discarded wood. “Why,” I asked?     The man said he would reuse them, but I wondered why he bothered, since an ample-sized  box […]