I am looking at a photograph taken on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue a little after 8 on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, and wishing my father was still around to fill in a few details. It’s a dramatic image. Center foreground is a cop in a riot helmet who seems to be weighing whether…

Stephen Barber came into the world with a hole in his heart. On the eve of World War II, he was home in Egypt, not long out of Bembridge, an English boarding school on the Isle of Wight, eager to enlist. They put a stethoscope to his chest and declared him unfit to serve. He…

I am just back from a couple of days of thrarrghing around the hills and hollows of southern and West Virginia with my friend Roland, he on his Harley, I on a BMW whose early years were spent under the bum of a New Mexico Highway Patrolman but which remains remarkably lively, nonetheless. In the course of…