I was raised as a Baptist, in a house across the street from a Roman Catholic church. Every day I marveled at the Catholics I saw, how different they were. The Baptist faith of my youth was cut from plain cloth, with simple rules: Everything I did or thought of doing was wrong, and I […]

One of my fondest memories of college is sitting in Phil Kennedy’s small room under the eaves of our fraternity house and watching him draw. He had small, black, bound books of blank paper, and working with a pen he would fill the pages with images from his imagination. It was magical. A chess piece, […]

When I was a boy, I used to take the NFT bus from Kenmore to downtown Buffalo, N.Y., on Saturdays to go to the movies. And often, my friend Russell and I would stop at a used book store, I think it was on Chippewa, and look through a box of movie stills and lobby […]

November 1999 I had a client in a southern city whose offices crowned a 20-story high-rise. We met in a corner conference room that overlooked a river and afforded us a sweeping view. Of course, I did my best to focus my attention on the people in business dress who ringed the table. But occasionally, […]

December 29, 2003 Several of my co-workers are playing hockey this winter, recalling to mind my own career in team sports. Perhaps my best moment was in 1966, on a cold, crisp autumn Saturday morning, when I tackled Sam Conway in a Delta Tau Delta game on the field by the Women’s Building at Syracuse […]

November 5, 2005 I received disturbing news this summer and I am still trying to sort it out. According to Dr. James Dobson, of “tough love” fame, I should be a homosexual. Certainly all that I feel and know about myself tells me that I am not. I really, really like women, and one in […]

As one who loves movies, I cherish my memory of the first, and only, feature film in Smell-O-Vision. Scent of Mystery was produced by Michael Todd Jr., a young man who gambled his legacy on a film that would go beyond sight and sound to engage the sense of smell. In the 1950s, movie theaters […]

September 14, 2005 Laurie sees woodchucks. We’ll be motoring along the Thruway and she’ll say, “Look, Kihm, a woodchuck.” I’ll look, and there’s no woodchuck. For years, I have accepted the explanation that Laurie has a keen eye and I am slow-witted. But recently, I’ve begun to think there may be another possibility. Maybe she’s […]