Russell E. Saltzman

He has reached a point where the toxins of renal failure have begun to occupy his days and his nights. A by-product are deep episodes of hallucination. He sees ants on the floor, stuffed animals coming to life. Most likely, he speculates, these are the animals my daughter once kept in what was her room before we moved him here to live with us. These animations run through the heating register or stand around staring at him goggle-eyed. From the dining room window, he expressed admiration for the marina in our back yard (I wish)… . Continue Reading »

Paula Deen, the Food Network’s chubby “Queen of Butter” chef, took a grim drubbing for failing to disclose her Type 2 diabetic diagnosis made in 2008. It came to light three years later only after she made a paid endorsement of a Novo Nordisk diabetic medication and launched a web site, Diabetes in a New Light, linked from the Novo Nordisk home site… . Continue Reading »

In my last column, I reviewed What a Young Wife Ought to Know (1901) by Emma Drake. It was part of a “sex and self” series that focused on what a young woman should do to establish a successful Victorian-like home at the turn of the last American century and one of two books my wife plucked off the shelf at a used book store. She spent eight dollars for the pair. I may have mumbled about more antiquarian books coming into the house but that ended right after I found a copy of Young Wife selling on eBay for thirty-eight dollars… . Continue Reading »

Wife and Number Two daughter should not be left unattended in used book stores. That’s how we ended up with the latest additions to our growing array of used (and all but used up) books: What a Young Wife Ought to Know (1901) and a companion volume, What a Young Husband Ought to Know (1897). Both were part of a “Sex and Self” series on how to live a successful Victorian middle class life… . Continue Reading »

The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed new regulations that will address child labor on farms. Among the proposed rules, paid child workers (these could be kids employed by their own families) under the age of fifteen would not be allowed to operate tractors, combines, ATVs, or most other power-driven equipment without special certification. No one under eighteen could work around grain elevators, feed lots, or livestock auctions. And no texting while tractoring; no iPod or walkie-talkie use, either… . Continue Reading »

I am of a conflicted mind when it comes to Christmas commercialization. Seasonal buying and selling fuels the economy and keeps Target and Wal-Mart out of Chapter 11. Our commercial Christmas supports a great number people who in good part owe their livelihoods to Christmas buying, not least the buying done by Christians. So maybe Christians have a point in their peevish complaints when a store chain banishes “Christmas” from shop floors during the, um, annual Holiday-Winter-Solstice-and-Something-Else season… . Continue Reading »

This has been a death-obsessed year for me, and no fun. Actually it’s been a couple of those years, starting in 2009. It has become an intrusive preoccupation. I reread some of my contributions on these pages and I seem stuck on the subject. Death shows up in only five of thirty-three articles; six of thirty-four if you count this piece. That’s like, what, sixteen percent? Not so bad, really, given that it looms so large in my mind. Yet I remember thinking while writing the other eighty-four percent, “At least I’m not talking about death.” … Continue Reading »

Hans and Inga, fictional names, got married. It happened so often hardly anybody took much note of it which is maybe why you never heard about it either. Hans and several thousand others like him were young soldiers from Hesse, Germany employed by the British to battle George Washington’s army in the American Revolution. The Hessian wartime predations were exaggerated by American war propaganda. The cruel, violent, merciless, fearsome mercenary Hessians who scared the crap out of honest hard-working American patriots early in the Revolution were by and large all good Lutheran boys”some of whom were known to sing Lutheran hymns when advancing on American lines… . Continue Reading »

Much is made of Steve Jobs graduation speech at Stanford. I don’t know why. I thought it was rather cold, even melancholic once I actually got around to reading it. Most of it could be reduced to a Budweiser commercial: “You only go around once in life; grab all the gusto you can . . . . Continue Reading »

I am no longer surprised at the perfectly dumb requests people make for their weddings, or even their funerals. Not that I haven’t given in to some of them; bad taste is always a liturgical option for some Christians. Unless the family wants to include a prayer to Moloch, there’s hardly a pastor these days with enough guts to refuse. There was that one time I ended up playing straight man to the groom’s dog. I didn’t know anything about the animal until perhaps three days before the wedding… . Continue Reading »