What's in Dave's Head

My maternal grandfather, Earl Frank Egleson, was born in 1902 in Middle Fork, West Virginia.  I had a special bond with Grandpa Earl.  As far back as I can remember, he managed to spend a lot of time with me.  One day when I was four or five, he took me for a walk from our house in Kensington, Maryland to Wheaton Plaza, which was probably three blocks away.  It was a great adventure for me.  I remember going through woods, although there are no woods around there anymore. He spent countless hours playing catch with me.  I had a lively arm but struggled with command.  In other words, I would throw as hard as I could and didn’t care too much where it went.  Once I sailed one well past him and into a peach tree we had in our backyard, knocking down a good number of fruit.  I got in big trouble for that one. My mom has given me a number of mementos from him.  He was big into cars, and somehow she had a really cool gearshift knob...

I’m kind of a book junkie.  I’ve read some really good ones over the past year.    Last week I finished one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve ever read, The Guns At Last Light by Rick Atkinson.   It’s the final book in his Liberation Trilogy about the Second World War’s Europe theatre.  (Spoiler alert: we won.)  The book is magnificent in how it brings to life the horror and humanity of war.  The writing is almost poetic, similar to one of my favorite novels, All the King’s Men , by Robert Penn Warren . I haven’t read the first two books in the Liberation Trilogy but my parents-in-law just gave them to me.  I start on them today.  Atkinson really pisses me off.  He’s a great writer.  He has a string of honors and awards, including two Pulitzers, one for investigative journalism and the other for the first book of the Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn .  As a reporter for the Washington Post he’s been on the fro...