New Horizons by Max Roy

                           East Or West? Adolf woke from a deep sleep. He woke with a start. He always had trouble getting to sleep, tossing and turning, his mind racing with plans. He slept in a simple white shift. He was in the bedroom he used when he was conferring with his advisors on the military base. He remembered he had meetings scheduled all day. “Fritz,” he called. “Fritz! Where are you?” Fritz Engel was one of his personnel assistants, the one who catered to his intimate needs when he was at this location. He was one with whom he could discuss issues he was working through with his General Staff. Fritz had a rank of Major General in the Wermacht, but he seemed expert in these matters far beyond his station. Everyone on the base knew him, and he received instant response to any request he made to the base commissary to meet the Fuhrer’s needs. Adolf could not remember when Fritz had been assigned to his tasks. It seemed to Adolf that Fritz had always been at his side.

                JUST DESSERTS! You might be thinking this is a story for the Cooking Channel, or, perhaps a story of intrigue and vengeance. Or both! I enter this arena with some trepidation because I know it will expose my biases without any careful evaluation of any rationales for justification. With current events crowding into our daily news, we can’t but help re-appraise our realities. I am thinking of the vast span of human history and how it shows that many of the human achievements we know about to-day were ill-rewarded. The Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Persian hegemonies, came and went, their contributions swallowed up by human history except for the odd remnant in a museum. In more recent centuries, we know how much we owe the Greeks for so many gifts, from philosophy, to drama, to democracy, perhaps even the written word from Cretan origins, yet their presence in our world of today is minimal, a tourist destination. Is this their just desserts? Is this their reward fo

  Bracing Ourselves for the Future   This is the year 2024. I am a representative of an older generation, lingering on, perhaps, past my time. I am absorbed by thoughts of the legacy we are leaving behind for our children.   Perhaps we personally don’t feel responsible for all that we leave behind, but things have happened on our watch. We, the older generation, are those from whose hands has been wrested- is being wrested, the control of what the future may hold. That does not free us from responsibility. We are the ones in the witness box. Who is responsible if not ourselves? We were the ones who stood on the shoulders of those who came before. We were there to build better than them. Who would have dreamed twenty years ago that we would be alive in the year 2024?   Twenty years ago, at the age of seventy, we went and got married. That speaks to our sense of optimism? But we remember well the past we lived through. After the war, and our near self-destruction, the humans in

Writing A Story   We don’t always want the world to know the details of our real story. We leave hints just for the fun of it-to see if the determined, the curious, the conspiracy theorists, can follow the tortuous trail we blaze through the thickets of our minds. We prefer to elaborate tales of the non-sequitor. We seek less dangerous stories to tell. We let our mind go loose among our flotsam and jetsom. There are mysterious, jagged zig-zags of electric-nano-energies trickling between the cellular protuberances of our brains. Random variances flow though our cellular landscapes, the minute geography of the material between our ears. We seek material for musings. The truth is, we ourselves don’t know where we are headed. All we know is that we are on a journey we have begun to somewhere down the road. We will come to various endpoints. If it is interesting, we extend the trip. If it is boring, or we tire, we bring it to an abrupt end. Then we go off on another tangent. We may

     Great Things About Making Mistakes! I’ve been thinking about this. Many people think that making mistakes is a bad thing. But I’ve come to the conclusion that making mistakes is a good thing, a very good thing! Allow me the time to explain. We’ve, most of us, grown up with the idea that making mistakes are bad things. We’ve screwed up! We are some kind of dummy who can’t get things right. If we make a mistake, don’t we try very hard to hide it from others so they won’t think ill of us? We try very hard not to make mistakes, don’t we? That seems sensible. We don’t purposely try to make mistakes. We try very hard to do the opposite. But in the real world, where we often don’t know what the right answers are, it is inevitable that we will make some mistakes trying to solve problems. The unfortunate truth is that we get lots of criticism for making mistakes even if our intentions are good. In the real world a lot of the good answers we find come to us after we have tried out oth

                              Nostalgia- Remembering Winnipeg Most of us have memories and feelings about the places of our birth if we have spent enough time during our lives after having reached an age of reason. I have thought about it and written some about it. After a long life spent mainly far away from the place of my birth, I am amazed at how much it marked me. I left Winnipeg permanently in my early “twenties” to pursue my education. I returned there only episodically, and surprisingly, considering that my parents continued to reside there and it was the home of “love of my life”. Indeed, I returned there more than once just to catch sight of my “future Bride” even if I did not appreciate it at the time. Winnipeg, more specifically, the Jewish community within which I was raised, always remained for me a presence. I carried a consciousness of it in my mind, as I wended my way through my life, sometimes in very distant places. I always bore in my mind my hatching place, whe