Recently, my mother celebrated her 100th birthday.  I took her to lunch at a restaurant we’d frequented over the years.  The proprietor doesn’t open in the afternoons, but for us he did. To make the occasion festive, I brought a  balloon and birthday cards sent by my friends wh

In 2014, I wrote about the Intentional Fallacy, a term of literary criticism. (6/5/14)   The theory states that to understand a work of art, nothing is relevant except the piece itself.  Knowledge of the artist’s childhood or what he or she ate for breakfast has no bearing on int