Author: thecolumnrule

‘FALL’/gunther October 25, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther IIII thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      Autumn arrives as a state of mind, prompted by the foliage change to wonderful hues or by memories of fall’s past that tug at your senses.       The light is different, incrementally as the weeks pass, but soon the imperceptibility becomes […]

October 18, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com About this time of year comes the memory of the apple smell, sweet fragrance that for me opened the door a bit to Heaven when I was a child at my grandmother’s house. She made apple pies, as many nanas did and do, from scratch. […]

October 11, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      There is the unordinary cat, thank heavens.      Remember kindergarten? Teachers encouraging individuality. Playing games together but drawing separately. Come the next grade and the ones afterward there are desks, increasing structure, necessary standards, all for progress, yes, but much more for […]

October 2, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      The cadence of life is the music we exist by, live by, endure by, thrill by, emote by, give birth by, laugh and cry by, die by. It is to each a unique song. Some sing better, some are almost tone deaf. Some […]

September 27, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com Once in my parts, a section of the Northeast where as yet not all the woods have been bulldozed by “Progress,” we measured fall’s coming by morning humidity on the side of a white clapboard garage. The glisten was subtle, almost like a fine spray […]

September 20, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com If true readers were the only people newspapers and Internet information providers had to be concerned about, there would be little reason for this essay. They are hooked on the news, educated and brought up and matured to understand the value of a free press […]

Twin Towers steel at Haverstraw Bay Park, Rockland County, N.Y./gunther photo   September 11, 2021 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 20 […]

Painting/gunther By Arthur H. Gunther III the columnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com   America’s Labor Day has morphed beyond the usual public time off — picnics and other respite — that recognizes workers. Now it is also 24 hours of heightened uncertainty. There is worry over whether the job you have now, if you are working, will be […]

August 30, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com  ahgunther@yahoo.com      I have now over-saturated my ears in tribute to Charlie Watts, last week late of the Rolling Stones, who must be rockin’ Heaven. Don’t care for Mick Jagger’s on-stage theater but Charlie, the classy, low-keyed drummer, was the yang to that yin, and […]

August 23, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com One of the qualifications of “progress” is that as new technology replaces the old, or brings it on in the first place, tried and true habits honed by trial, error, ingenuity, make-do and survival are lost. For example, in this age of air conditioning, a […]

  August 16, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com It may seem hilarious and even back-woodsy, but there was a moment, a long one, when at 2 a.m. in a diner, say Hogan’s in West Nyack, N.Y., when you instinctively pulled up your feet as the floor guy came by, splashing Clorox and […]

  By Arthur H. Gunther III  thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com If you could capture images of the past and store them as memory files that could be flashed on a computer screen, then I would show you what my bedroom in Hillcrest, N.Y., looked like at age 19, in another century literally.  My room – almost 60 […]

‘COLOR’/gunther 2021 August 2, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      In these colors – black, white, brown, red, yellow – there is humanity and inhumanity. We do not see clear colors, untouched by others – that is impossible no matter the prejudice. You can live and die in one color, but […]

July 25, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com One recent day, I took a car ride with an intriguing woman (all are), and we had conversation. Never sure where those mutual talks lead, as I draw from a stream of consciousness, and the partner usually does the same. That means you are in the […]

photo/gunther   July 19, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com   Every home has its entrance, perhaps a front porch or steps or inside foyer. So it is with places, usually introduced by paths, then roads. In Rockland County, N.Y., close to Gotham but oh so many miles away ifrom urbanity there is […]

July 12, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com (ahgunther@yahoo.com)      Stare at a door long enough, and it will open by itself. No, this isn’t telekinesis, merely but sometimes profoundly, a memory trip.      We open and close, leave open and close doors throughout our existence, letting people, thoughts and life itself […]

Painting by gunther July 4, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      TAPPAN, N.Y. – “When in the course of human events” begins the document crafted for July 4, 1776, a federal holiday now recognized as Independence Day. That the American Experiment has barely begun is as obvious as fireworks. As explosive […]

June 28, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com        I did not have to look up, as I was arranging my pocket money, to know the age of the fellow counting my change. He had to be about 62 or older. The clue? The bill was $11, and I gave him […]

June 21, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      While away from the daily deadline of the newspaper business (regrettably), I forever remain one of the irreverent, questioning, doubting souls with a heart that melts. So in this born-again era of claimed “fake news,” once termed, “You can’t believe everything you read […]

The McCullers home, South Broadway, South Nyack, N.Y. /gunther photo June 14, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com In a coincidence, if there is such, recently I walked past the late writer Carson McCullers’ Broadway house in South Nyack, N.Y., went home, and on TV was the film of her 1940 first novel, […]

June 7, 2021   By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com Envelopes — legal sized or not — may be an anachronism in the digital world, in this morphing time of Tweets, Facebook posts and cell phone text shorthand, but using them can prompt memories that probably will not happen if you hit the smartphone […]

  By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com No Memorial Day, USA or elsewhere, is without heartfelt words and tribute, parades, wreaths, re-mourning. What is missing are the voices of the fallen. Would that we could hear them. What would they say? “Mom, I was as scared as you, but I could not show that with […]

  May 24, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com NYACK, N.Y. — In the birthplace village of Edward Hopper, the famed American realist artist (1882-1967), it is a simple thing to note the early morning Hudson River light that he bottled and used in all the paintings of his long career. That was […]

gunther photo May 17, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com In the virus time many have found the slower pace and solitude that eluded them in the ordinary hustle-bustle of making a living, holding things together, joining the masses on the ever-more-crowded commuter highway. Not exactly lemmings to the sea, but a march […]

May 10, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      Royal Clinton Taplin or RCT, as this longtime newspaperman was either admiringly or derisively called by reader, public official and wrong-doer, has hit the last keys on -30-, the traditional end for a story, joining the irreverent ones in whatever heaven, hell or […]

May 3, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com         When you go to an art museum, the standard pose of course has you pondering in front of a particular work, perhaps stepping back, putting one hand under chin, tilting head, moving forward, all in a studious attempt to “get” the […]

The Königsee in Bavaria was crystal clear when I took this photograph, free of many of the ravages of climate change, fed by the waters of the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, as nature intended. May the rest of the earth have that good fortune as well. The Germans are quite strict on protecting natural waterways. […]

April 19, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com The half pirouette that the young woman made as she stood on a street corner mimicked a movement many of us have performed, waiting for a school bus, another ride, a friend. It is akin to looking at our watch, staring at our shoes, whistling in […]

April,12, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      There are memory moments for every grade in life, whether that is literally first grade, or making the grade or existing on any level for a particular time. The moments become part of language unique to the individual, and you can go back and […]

  April 5, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com       He shuffles in his twilight, this once robust newspaper compositor who could knock someone out with one punch, dance for hours at a ballroom and bellow obscenities in very bad temper, all with a charm that oddly attracted. He could also […]

SELFLESS March 29, 2021 By ARTHUR H. GUNTHER III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com     When I came off the crest of the hill heading down Spring Valley’s Main Street at 1 a.m. Tuesday, March 23,  just 8 minutes after the alarm for the fatal Evergreen Court Home For Adults fire in the village, I could see […]

March 15, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      No longer are there country lanes in this life, grateful though as one must be for having once traveled in the heady quiet of a summer night, windows open in non-air conditioned car but the heat of July dissipated both by a sun […]

March 8, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com      Way back in my time, in my small village where a Saturday morning might begin with a long walk through town to an old schoolyard or a field of winter straw, the settings for thoughts of nothing in particular but sometimes more than […]

March 1, 2021 Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@yahoo.com      America doesn’t smile as much these days. The virus. Jobs gone, debt, deficit, taxes, disappointing “leaders,” the greedy, less spirit, confused purpose, lost understanding of how, why the nation was founded  — not much to be happy about.       Until you see a […]

February 22, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com ahgunther@hotmail.com      Don’t each oranges much any more, or tangerines, as the march of time has made the delectable juice the foe of my system. But once just the peeling of the fruit, with tangy whiff as you pressed the north or south pole to […]

February 15, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com (contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com)      I recall a particularly down day way, way back when a combination of disappointment, inaction, frustration and inertia had me idling in neutral. Could not see the road ahead. It would normally be one of those times when you just didn’t get […]

February 8, 2021   ‘SNOW’/gunther Fresh snow as a washed face, clothes anew, day begins In opportunity not seen Before the storm.

February 1, 2021  ‘AMERICAN PROMISE’/acrylic, gunther   By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com (Contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com)      This House, isolated in American vastness, no chimney seen, no doorknob, no curtains, yet it is a sturdy home, not abandoned, people within, green, fertile fields, blue sky floating on rich, yellow, warming sun. Picture of endurance, fortitude, independence, […]

January 25, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com (contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com)      If I had a real conversation with Sara, who is in a room during this virus, as so many of us are, her face not seen though we can imagine her thoughts, it would come after our eyes met. I would wait for that, […]

January 18, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com (Contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com) When you wrote your first letter, no matter how old you were, or sent away a quarter with three box tops to a cereal company to get a baking soda-powered plastic toy submarine that you could throw in the bath water, you took what […]

January 11, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com (Contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com)      The painting accompanying this essay is titled “Storm” and is a reworked piece following the tumult of 2020, now spilled into early 2021. It is, despite the movement and color, a work of hope.      The painting is based in part […]

‘AT THE ASTOR’/gunther January 4, 2021 By Arthur H. Gunther III ‘2021’/acrylic/gunther      Sometime in 2021, the Astor sign will again be lit metaphorically in tourist spots across the globe; we will no longer just stare at paintings on the walls; but we will remember the quiet, the great gifting quiet of 2020 that […]

December 28, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com (contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com)      If the world were a tree, and we brought forth water and pruning and, most of all appreciation no matter the shape, the variety, the location, the age, there would be enough shade for everyone, enough fruit, enough beauty.      And […]

December 20, 2020      Each winter holiday season, this space is reserved for my son Arthur, a teacher and writer who has been offering stories for two decades. By Arthur H. Gunther IV (Contact: clausland@yahoo.com) The couple had taken to nightly drives right after the clocks had fallen back in October.  Spring and summer […]

December 14, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com (contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com)      Gotta tell you a very human story.       The other day, in the middle of this awful virus time, I got a call from a friend who needed help replacing an electrical switch, something not beyond me.      “OK, I […]

  December 7, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com Contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com   Just a few words here. After posting a recent painting without text except for the title “HISTORY,” on various internet sites, I was asked to provide a narrative.      Truth is, we write our own when we look at art work […]

November 29, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com Contact: ahgunther@hotmail.com We all have our time and mood anchors, those moments of memory that moor us in the ordinary as well as during the storms that hit our lives. Stress of any sort — financial, emotional, health — drive us to port, and we are […]

November 23, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III (contact/comment: ahgunther@hotmail.com)      “Gimme rewrite!”      Once, there was a “Front Page” in every community, newspapers and characters straight out of the famous 1928 play/movie by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, but now the city rooms are fast shutting their lights as the roar of […]

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Many painters don’t title their works or provide only cryptic ones, perhaps  because they do not know what the pieces say, preferring that their “language” speak for itself. Maybe even tell the artist what “it” means. And, besides, it may be in the eye of the beholder […]

November 10, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Joe is in, so is Kamala. Next, it’s gotta be the people.      Kamala Harris cannot have her office in Washington, where the K-Street lobbyists and other special interests buy elections and pull strings for clients from domestic to foreign, from the military […]

      November 2, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      It should be un-American to hate, to be a bigot, to let fear and want from loss of job and community change to bully others from speaking, to let your religion tell you it is right to exclude non-believers. It should […]

Hugh Bonner’s funeral, St. Patrick’s Day, 1908, NYC October 26, 2020   By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      I am partly of Bonner heritage, Irish through my grandmother Mary and also Scot as the family was Bonnar there before some went to Donegal. This matters to me mostly, in 2020 especially,  because I […]

October 19, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      In another century, it seems, there were conversations about everything yet nothing of great import. Those two were not going to solve the world’s problems nor were they going to impress each other with pontification. Even the exact words did not matter, for it […]

October 12, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There is a road on the South Mountain, a winding, hilly journey that has long defined the lives of farmers and artists. It is the plan of the gods for there is little difference between the two nurturers who plant and harvest that which […]

  October 5, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com Curiosity, we are warned, killed the cat, but the naysayers never tell you about the nine lives. Curiosity was a welcome trait for Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, who thought out of the box, who applied independent, non-conformist learning skills to their journey. Einstein’s son Hans […]

September 28, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com The “American Dream” has always been “just white,” and until the nation admits that, some of those who have arrived will keep people of color and immigrants from success. And some of those who do achieve the dream, no matter the ethnicity, the skin tone, become […]

Acrylic on canvas/gunther   September 21, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There is at least a single incomplete umbrella in anyone’s life, no pole leading to canopy, a metaphor for incompleteness, perhaps something unfinished or just plain out of sight to anyone but you.      The journey taken, the one […]

September 14, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Some seasons ago, quite a few really, the no. 6 red naugahyde-covered twirling diner stool at Tiny’s Spring Valley, N.Y., place offered a fine view of the glass donut and sliced cake case, which, of course, was a most tempting time, even for a […]

September 7, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      On a very hot and humid day, in the New York State that now is in summer more like Georgia, don’t avoid puddles. They instantly cool your soles and so give you reason not to give up the exercise walk that is keeping you […]

August 31, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Rituals in our lives change, but that does not mean they are easy to get used to. They are even tougher to accept. Here I was in another town, USA, the location no less important than any, communities where life begins, passes, ebbs and […]

August 24, 2020 By Arthur H.Gunther III This painting of mine is rural America, where predictability, reliability, routine are the melody for living. Conservatism, fear of government overreach service, Pony Express on, a life-stream of letters, parcels, farm equipment parts, seed, baby chicks, then medicine and whatever few checks might come in retirement. From this […]

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com A peach in season is like long-sought 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 next season. It isn’t Adam and […]

  ANGELS IN THE ROOM August 10, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com “Religion” is no longer organized or traditional for this writer though I have respect for all beliefs and for the utter great goodness of those humanitarians found within them who as reward regularly suffer the slings and arrows and condemnation of […]

August 3, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Ordinarily, birds would not attract notice in the backyard. Laissez-faire: they go about their life, and I do the same. Do like their singing, chirping, fact that they are there, which probably means no horror story like a hurricane is coming or a win […]

July 29, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      When in the time of virus you are so bored that you run from the house screaming “I can’t take it any more,” how do you return to normal blood pressure?      For me last week it was walking about the upper back […]

July 20, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There seems a steady rhythm these days living amongst the restrictions of the time of virus, whether it be the gift of simplicity in just not doing much at home, sitting in a chair thinking or reading, perhaps tea at some hour, a cookie […]

This is the first installment of a fictional piece that I hope offers real-life metaphors for all. The story may be continued. … The Seanchaí (shan-a-key) By Arthur H. Gunther      It was a bit of an amble on the N15 that Dermont Bonner took to Killygordon from Strabane, but this gave the seanchaí […]

July 5, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Back when, and “when” is whenever you or I hold a memory about a place or someone or thing, there was a country road in Pomona, N.Y.,  named McNamara, and though the signs still proclaim it, no longer is this a rural place.     […]

June 29, 2020 “THE NARROW LAND,” a novel about artist Edward Hopper but really about us all By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      In this moment — perhaps age — of revisiting our past, heralded national leaders, authors, statesmen, etc., it is vital to place actions that today are deemed unacceptable in the […]

Fathers Day 2020  By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com     As my Dad lie dying in hospital and I on my way to visit his presence for the last time he could speak, not yet in the induced coma that would let him pass, already with the angels beside him, I thought, on that […]

One room, two very different windows, each of individual color and particular perspective. But they co-exist./gunther painting       ‘TWO WINDOWS’/gunther By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      This virus stay-at-home has brought back childhood memories of being in the house an awful lot in the summer though building forts in the ever-present […]

June 8, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      I will tell you a story or two of neighborhood police back in my older days in Spring Valley, N.Y., a then countrified community north of Gotham. This was the time when officialdom did not have to invent the term “community policing” and seek […]

By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Decades ago, Rockland County, N.Y., faced an interracial situation that I covered as a Journal-News photographer. I offer my account and image of that July 4, 1966, event in Suffern to report on the non-violent protest and how in that situation the commonsense response from participants, the […]

/acrylic-wood/gunther Memorial Day weekend 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com Noting Memorial Day and the many thousands of Americans and non-citizens who have sacrificed their lives in war; bowing in humility to the dying and dead — the champions of this time of virus; hailing the “Rosie Riveters” and all defense workers of the […]

May 18, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      One of the enforced benefits of this time of the virus — sitting at home — can be good for you even though you might want to be out gallivanting. For example, watching PBS. You are the adult student in your living-room classroom, and […]

May 11, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      One of the things about staying home during the time of virus is that you have to escape. The walls can move in a bit, and suddenly the back yard where you never went except to mow the lawn becomes Central Park. But there […]

May 4, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      There had been many quick jumps across my childhood street in Hillcrest, N.Y., to see my friend Matthew but also to sit down with his grandmother, Molly Weissman. This bubbe, in her late 80s, a survivor of Russian pogroms and with the shared DNA […]

April 27, 2020 By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      Greed is the virus that never goes away, in good times, in bad ones. It is exploitive, growing exponentially with pandemic illness, for example, its handlers quickly looking to seize any opportunity to rake in more cash. It has no soul, this devil.    […]

‘SOCIAL DISTANCING’/photograph/gunther By Arthur H. Gunther III thecolumnrule.com      “Social distancing” is not new. As kids, we were forced to go to such lengths if we had older siblings who walked faster and who ignored us anyway. Couples always have had bouts of deliberately setting themselves apart. Go to a social affair and see […]