by Vincent McCaffrey | Jan 2, 2019 | Blog, Essays
Children crave order in their lives. Given the seeming chaos aswirl about them, fixing on the specific edges of a particular blanket or a sequence of events that repeats regularly, like a nap time or snack time, offers them a sense of what and when. There is comfort...
by Vincent McCaffrey | Jan 1, 2019 | Blog, Essays, Uncategorized
It is a calendared thing To mark the beginning, And once again to start As if there’s an end to it, And the year is complete And something new commenced; As if you might do over, Or bid farewell and goodbye To what you have done— Little or all that it is; For what you...
by Vincent McCaffrey | Dec 13, 2018 | Blog, Essays
Booksellers are a lot like actors. It is a cliche that actors will too often assume they are capable of the accomplishments of the characters they portray and come to believe that they know what a character actually felt. Booksellers often see themselves as possessing...
by Vincent McCaffrey | Dec 4, 2018 | Blog, Essays
I suppose it is the arrogance that offends me most. Not the stupidity. An individual can be correct and be arrogant and thus offensive. I am usually willing to forgive stupidity because such foolishness comes to me so easily. But stupidity, at least on a case by case...
by Vincent McCaffrey | Nov 21, 2018 | Blog, Essays
That some would have you believe your liberties are fragile and must be protected by government, or that you must trade your liberty in one thing to have it in another, is in the very nature of tyrants, despots, and town clerks. Your freedom is your domain, alone....
by Vincent McCaffrey | Sep 29, 2018 | Blog, Essays
What we all must learn, I suppose, or else lose ourselves completely, is that very little in the world is really about us. My experience fifty years ago at Mark Hopkins College in Brattleboro Vermont was peripheral to that time and place—not secondary or marginal or...
