So there really are ghosts, spirits of the dead I mean, that haunt the living, forcing us to live with an unbearable memory, or reminding us that our lives once intersected with those of others, some of whom won’t be left entirely behind. I never understood the nature of ghosts, nor was I even convinced of their existence, until I heard the story, long after my father’s death, of the ghost that haunted him as he lay dying in a hospital bed in suburban New York.
     One morning his younger brother came to visit and was surprised to find Dad agitated and confused. “What’s wrong?” asked my uncle.
     “He was just standing there,” said Dad, “at the foot of the bed, in his uniform. The German. He was just standing there looking at me. He was right there, in his uniform. He was there until you walked in, Willy, staring at me.”
    It took my uncle a little while to calm Dad down and get him to tell the whole story. The young German my father saw that morning was a soldier he had killed in 1944. Dad was a first sergeant with the Ninth U.S. Infantry Division and fought in the invasions of North Africa, Italy and Normandy. In addition to three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, he earned eight battle stars. His unit, the 47th Regiment, landed at Utah Beach on June 10, four days after D-Day. He apparently ran into this particular German shortly thereafter.

    While on Christmas vacation I read The Stone Raft, my first encounter with the unusual style of Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. The stone raft of the title refers to the Iberian peninsula, which is set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean after the Pyrenees mountains split down the middle. The novel focuses on a journey across Iberia taken by five people, all of whom have had experiences that, like the sudden crackup of the Pyrenees, defy the laws of the physical universe.
    More intriguing to me, however, than this fantastic plot is the style in which Saramago writes. He pays little heed to the conventions of usage and punctuation, and the run-on sentence structure he employs takes some getting used to. But his ideas, imagery, and affection for his characters were all very attractive to me. Here's just one example of his style, a sentence I particularly like ("Deux Chevaux" is the Citroen car in which the characters travel):
   "And what I'd like to know is what moves inside us and where does it go, no, I'm not talking about worms, microbes, bacteria, those living creatures that inhabit us, I'm referring to something else, something that moves and perhaps moves us at the same time, just as constellation, galaxy, solar system, sun, earth, sea, peninsula, and Deux Chevaux move and move us with them, what is the name, finally, of the thing that moves all the rest, from one end of the chain to the other, or perhaps there is no chain and the universe is a ring at once so thin that apparently only we and what is inside us fit into it and so thick that it can accommodate the maximum dimension of the universe, which is the ring itself, what is the name of what follows after us."
   Wow.  

   I was the substitute host of a talk-radio show called Court TV Morning on Sirius Satellite Radio from spring of 2006 until it was discontinued at the close of 2007. Because the show aired on the Court TV channel, the overall theme was crime/legal news, but I did my best to stretch the topics into the realms of politics and international affairs whenever possible.
   I had a blast. The talk-radio format is wonderful because of the freedom it allows, the copious amounts of time available, and the opportunity to have serious discussions with a wide range of guests, including not only trial lawyers and legal scholars, but authors and experts on all manner of subjects. Having been a TV correspondent and producer for many years, and a print reporter and editor long before that, I've found radio to be a relaxed and more accommodating medium. It's a lot easier to produce than TV, and one can get much deeper into more complex subject matter than is the case on TV, what with the absurdly short attention span television imposes on talent and viewers alike.
   At the end of this post you'll see the control panel for a podcast, which includes a few highlights from my more energetic radio rants. Topics include the notorious shoe-bomber Richard Reid, the question of whether the US tortures terrorism suspects, and the State Department's use of mercenaries in Iraq. By the way, the other voices you'll hear are those of two pals of mine, Glen Jones, a DJ on WFMU radio out of New Jersey, and Bob Regan, who ran Court TV's News Center. Just click the "play" button; it runs about three-and-a-half minutes.