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By RICHARD MCCARTHY

When I was an upperclassman at a large parochial high school in the midsize city where I grew up, a group of us hung out at an old-fashioned, dark, downtown pool hall. Although we were working class kids (this was in the days before parochial schools...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

About a mile from where I live, there is a convenience store and a doughnut shop. For a period of a few years, a woman of perhaps 60 years of age could be found standing outside one of these establishments on most days. She would be shuffling her...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

Sometimes I turn on the television for what a friend of mine calls “bubble gum for the mind,” just something to chew on a little bit. Once in a while that expected slight entertainment turns into something more than that, something riveting, and not...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

I suspect a fair number of readers are aware who Timothy Leary was, and more still have heard his name as part of the lexicon of popular culture. For those who do not know, he was one of the more famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective)...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

Recently, I was at an airport and waiting for the same plane was a group of what looked to be about 12-to-14-year-old boys, all wearing the same black sweatsuits, with the same logo on the front of the sweatshirt. You could feel the electricity...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

I spent a few years of my life writing one-act plays in the wee hours of the morning before I went off to my job. Three of those plays were produced at small theaters in New York City (off-off-Broadway), as part of a bill of one-act plays by different...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

A little while back, I was in one of our local independent markets, and a little boy of perhaps three or four years old started to wail with abandon. The man who was with the boy practiced a minute or so of what I thought of as model parenting skills,...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

I came up with the idea of having ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence-based tool, write a column in my writing style. Not knowing much about AI at that time, I enlisted the help of Matthew Berube, Head of Information Services Reference, Online...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

Many people reading this column have “people watched” along the way, some more than others. Some folks also may practice “people reading,” which I will define as developing a character description of someone from whatever visual clues they give. I...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

Sometimes you come across someone who has carved out a unique slice of life with which to nourish themselves, even to feast upon. I met such a person in Cooperstown, New York, someone who spent their days in a way I’d never conceived of, outside of...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

A friend of mine had a terminal illness, and I went to visit him at a medical facility. Perhaps that is a dark sentence to begin a story, not brimming with enticement, but it’s a real one.On the way over to see him I felt like you do when life serves...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

Once when I was walking on a main drag in Toronto, I turned to the woman I was with and said, “The guys here dress differently than I do.” Without missing a beat, she said, “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You’re equally out of fashion...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

A little while back, I heard someone use the phrase “this whole and broken world.” Twice in recent times, I’ve had verbal back-and-forths that brought those words to life.Last March I was in Florida, staying at a rental, right on the relatively remote...

By RICHARD MCCARTHY

This past fall, I was bicycling in Hadley and I came up on a dead squirrel in the road. I got off my bike and used the instep of my foot to move the remains to the edge of a field on the side of the road. Two other cyclists approached me as I was...