Category: life in USA
The Price is Weird
Part III If there was some time you could go back to, what would it be? My friends and I sometimes kicked this question around, before we had families and on occasion after that event. It’s been a long time since any of those occasions. I suppose that gradually our attentions were simply captured by…
The Price is Weird
Part II In his 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” author Thomas Piketty observes a curious phenomenon about prices: Throughout the 1800’s, novels reported the incomes of their main characters—servants and peasants, not so much—as a way of benchmarking their social positions. Incomes also revealed something of family history for the gentry, because people…
Daddy
We lived in a half-duplex in West Hazleton, Pennsylvania until early February 1954. I think a large object in the cellar was a coal furnace, but our heat came from the kitchen cast-iron coal stove, and something called a “heat-o-lator” in the living room, which was some kind of coal firebox with a protective sheet…