Opinion

Mondays are busy days in the Carroll County Newspapers newsroom, and today is no exception. A lot goes into producing a newspaper on deadline, especially one with a full-time staff of three people. But in between writing stories and toning photos and proofreading pages today, I’m also trying to take a little time to enjoy my birthday and count my blessings...

Regular readers of this column know I’m obsessed with horror movies. These days, I have a companion for most every movie I want to see. Gideon is truly the best. It’s nice to have him there, but sometimes I miss going to the movie theater alone. For most of high school and college, I was a solo moviegoer. ...

Every once in a while, an event happens that is so memorable, many people have no trouble remembering exactly where they were or what they were doing at the time. For myself, some of those events include the Iran hostage crisis, the death of John Lennon, the attempted assassination of President Reagan, the Challenger disaster and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City...

Last week, I wrote about the dissolution of a close friendship, something I’m sure many of you have experienced. In that instance, I was the person to pull the plug. But I’ve had plenty of failed friendships with a different trajectory: me hanging on tightly as the other person pulled away, all the while feeling like I was proving something by not giving up...

Nearly 20 years ago while on a plane from Paris to Detroit I started writing the commentary “Two Americans in Paris on 9/11.” It was published in the Carroll County News on the 10th anniversary of the attack. Today seems an appropriate time to reflect back and consider what has changed since that awful day — both for better and worse...

Bless all my math teachers for their patience and understanding. Math has never been my strongest suit. Don’t get me wrong — I can do it and understand it, I just don’t generally retain the methods without daily use. Spending my early years as a sportswriter, I came to rely on box scores, season averages and the like and can still figure out a team’s winning percentage against a left-handed quarterback in a snow game on a Saturday fairly easily...

Editor’s Note: This letter is a response to a Letter to the Editor written by Andrew Dziedzic  of Berryville and published in the Aug. 24 issue. Dear Andrew, I read your article in the paper entitled “Do better Carrol County.” In that article it was explained that a friend reached out to a church to ask for transportation help. They were not asking for a free handout and the results were that they were declined due to they were not members...

Four years ago, a close friend pointed out that we had been friends for five years. According to some internet meme, they said, that meant we would be friends for the rest of our lives. I believed them the way everyone believes their best friend: happily, openly and blindly...

I was reminded earlier this week about something that happened during my tenure as managing editor of the daily newspaper in Pine Bluff. I happened to run into that city’s mayor at a convenience store, and he did not speak to me. That wasn’t really surprising; he hadn’t been taking my phone calls for several months at that point, after I called him to discuss his habit of trying to embarrass the talented and hardworking, but young and sometimes meek, reporter I had assigned to cover City Hall. ...

Last week marked the third consecutive year that Gideon has gone back to school. Of course, he spent most of the summer working on professional development and the first few weeks in August getting his classroom ready. Being married to a teacher is a learning experience in itself — for example, I have learned to avoid making jokes about how teachers have the whole summer off...