The Northcountry Chronicle

All the News That’s Fit to Print?

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by W.D. Ehrhart For the past few months, I have largely avoided political events and especially contemporary goings-on involving the staggeringly comically greedy egotistical narcissistic bigoted hate-fueled criminal he-would-be-unbelievable-except-that-we’re seeing-it-daily-with-our-own-eyes excuse for a human being occupying what has become the Whitewash House. Instead, I’ve written essays that made fun of King Charles III’s impressive chest of medals and decorations, eulogized the writer Philip Caputo, mourned the passing of our 22-year-old cat, mocked the inability of politicians to keep their penises in their pants, remembered my high school graduating class of 1966, and written about my struggles with weight gain. But today I’ve decided that it’s …

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Russian Potato Dumplings

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by W.D. Ehrhart I inherited a “fat gene” from my mother. She was maybe 5’4” or 5’5”. When she got married in 1943, she weighed 103 pounds. When she died in 1990, she weighed over 300 pounds. Her younger brother was in ROTC in college, so he couldn’t have been too heavy back then, but by the time I was old enough to remember him, he was badly overweight, obese really. Others of her siblings had weight problems, too. In 9th grade, at age 14, I had a double chin and used to have to buy my clothing in what were called “husky” sizes. By …

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Trying to Avoid Giving Up

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by W.D. Ehrhart I have to confess that I have been struggling mightily for the past few months to resist giving in to utter despair. There’s no future in that. But increasingly I find myself thinking that there’s really no future worth bothering about. I just can’t shake the feeling that things in this country are not going to get any better. Remember when we thought no president could possibly get any worse, be any more evil, than Richard Milhous Nixon, whom I took to calling King Richard the Milhous? And then we got empty-headed George W. Bush, who dragged us into not one but …

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Farewell, Beanie

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by W.D. Ehrhart Last Friday was a very sad day for me, my wife Anne, and my daughter Leela. We had to euthanize our cat Beanie, who had been with us for nearly 22 years. That’s almost half of Anne’s and my 45 years of marriage. And as anyone who’s ever loved a pet knows, Beanie was a member of our family. She wasn’t like a family member; she was a family member. Our daughter Leela and her then-boyfriend found Beanie in the boyfriend’s yard one cold November night when Beanie was maybe five weeks old and weighed barely a pound. Beanie had gotten separated …

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Sexual Peccadilloes of Public People

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by W.D. Ehrhart So much for ex-Marine oysterman and working-class hero Graham Platner’s bid to unseat the sleazy weaselly Susan Collins in the U.S. Senate. Another American male undone by his inability to keep his pants up. It just amazes me—indeed, leaves me breathless and flabbergasted—how often men seem to be incapable of resisting the desire to engage in sequel activity at inappropriate times and with inappropriate partners. Don’t misunderstand me. Ever since I hit puberty about 64 years ago, I’ve enjoyed sex as much as the next man. Indeed, prior to my marriage at the age of 32, I was more active than I …

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What Rawand Dreams Of

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by W.D. Ehrhart Readers who have followed my writing in the New Hampshire Gazette will perhaps recall that I have written multiple times in the past few years about my unusual friendship with a young Palestinian woman named Rawand Gawad Abu Ghanem, to whom I was first introduced by way of the scholar Lorrie Goldensohn and the playwright Naomi Wallace.  Because Rawand can only text and I can only e-mail, all of our communication has been through Naomi. I’ve never met Rawand, nor even spoken to her, and probably never will get the chance to do either.  But she and her family—a husband and two …

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