Rex Smith

We sometimes think that no time before was as perilous or troubled as our time. Probably that’s not true.

The other day I was talking with a guy who said that because he loved hockey he had put in almost 30 years as a referee for youth and adult amateur hockey games. But he gave it up recently, he said, because he couldn’t take the abuse: the people, especially parents, who would attack him verbally, even threaten him physically, because they didn’t like his calls.

I grew up in the American West, and I still have some family out that way, which is how it happens that I found myself last week casting flies into a clear mountain stream – one of Ernest Hemingway’s favorites, in fact. I was hoping that I might fool a rainbow trout into believing that my little fly might be a delicious dinner.

My mother dropped out of college after two years to get married, and so did her daughter, my older sister. My mom was 19 and my sister was 20 -- both just about at the median age for women to marry for the first time in their days: my mom in 1941, my sister in 1964.

It was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who wrote, “The only constant in life is change.” People weren’t comfortable with change when he wrote that, some 2,600 years ago, and we’re still not. Sometimes for good reason.

Around this time last year, my wife noticed some black spots on the parsley and dill growing in our garden at home. I didn’t think much of it – the dots looked like bird droppings to me – but my wife got pretty excited: They’re eggs, she said – most likely of the black swallowtail butterfly.

Several days ago a 14-foot-long, 1,600-pound great white shark was spotted off the coast of North Carolina. Here’s the bad news: It was headed north. And last month an even bigger 20-foot shark swept through a pond off Block Island – which is off the coast of Rhode Island.

When I took up a career in journalism a half-century ago, I accepted the task of using words responsibly. You can’t be sloppy with language if your goal is to be accurate; that is, you can’t exaggerate, say, nor can you fail to articulate a harsh reality. Words matter.

I live in a great neighborhood – a place on the edge of a little city, where suburbia kind of meets the rolling hills of the Upstate countryside. It's not just the place we like, though; it’s the people, too.