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Burton Cole column

When? I’ll get to it precisely at — later

What is it about detail people? If I tell you I’ll get back to you later, that’s precisely when you’ll hear back from me — later. I don’t see how I can be any more exact than that. Yet some persnickety people insist on knowing the time, down to the minute. My late wife — and the word “late” applies a couple of different ways — was gifted a watch commemorating something that her family called “Terry Time.” For Terry, time was relative. She’d get there when she got there. The face of the watch features Mr. Relativity himself, Albert Einstein. And the ...

Remember, just keep on driving, keep on driving

I don’t mean to brag, but I drove somewhere without my GPS. And arrived where I meant to be. Without getting lost once. Seriously. This would be ho-hum news a few decades ago. Then technology began erasing our memories. Not erasing, exactly. More like replacing. When I was a teen, I carried a Rolodex of telephone numbers in my head. Then I gained a smartphone and lost my smarts. Since the phone remembers all the phone numbers I need, I can’t recall more than a couple of digits on my own. The GPS did in our brains a similar disservice. In the old days, if I didn’t already ...

We’re smiling through the seasonal tears

For many of us, tears accompany this joyful season of giving thanks and giving gifts. We’re missing hearts that used to beat alongside ours. I used to think that it would be a blessing that if once, just once, I wouldn’t be told that I had arranged the Thanksgiving table the wrong way ...

Say that again, but this time, make it make sense

Whenever life has me stumped and I don’t know what to do next, I sit back and ponder, “What would HE do?” He, of course, refers to that bear whose head is stuffed with fluff, Winnie-the-Pooh. Pooh Bear himself once said, “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and other people are looking at it.” Generally, I doze off in the middle of contemplating that bit of wisdom, and by the time I stir awake, things don’t look quite as ...

With age comes wisdom — but this just ain’t it

I heard the phrase “hidden wisdom” the other day and thought, “Hey, that’s me!” I am chock full of wisdom. I have so much wisdom that it’s rolling out of my ears. But my wisdom is hidden. It must be. Nobody can see it. “Cole, if you had a brain, you’d be dangerous,” is one of the nicer things people say to me when I proclaim something profound. Yeah, well… well… Oooh, I’m sure I’ll think of something smart to say as a retort. Because I have hidden away tons of wisdom. While I’m thinking, let me share a few of these genius nuggets I’ve collected ...

You call this cozy, when the dark of Novem-brrrr came early?

“You want me to come over and help you take those air conditioners out of your windows?” I shook my head. “I hate to do that so early. We’ve got to have another stretch of warm days, right?” The next morning when I left for the office, the thermometer shivered at 37 degrees. Because it was the first full week of Novem-brrrr. I had forgotten that November is when the “brrrr” months get serious. Septembrrrr and Octoberrrr are a pleasant but often weird variety of 90-degree highs and 40-degree lows. There’s just enough brrrr in there to relieve the monotony of summer ...