Rex Smith

In recent weeks, I have used this golden opportunity to offer commentary on a valued regional public radio network mainly to talk about journalism. I’m comfortable with that because it has been my professional focus for a half-century.

There’s a reference book called the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, which is how I know that it was some five-and-a-half centuries ago that a book first declared, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” Actually, in that 1576 book, Petit Palace, attributed to someone named G. Pettie, the phrasing was, “So long as I knoweth it not, it hurteth me not.”

Ever since Donald Trump became a political force a decade ago, we’ve been told that his popularity is in part a result of grievance – that is, a lot of people become part of the MAGA faithful because they believe that the political system and American institutions are stacked against them.

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.