The curious, tobacco-inflected correspondence between my adolescent grandfather and Mark Twain. First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, March 2023. I never knew my paternal grandfather and namesake, Edward Mason Anthony Sr., who died a decade and a half before I was born. I can’t remember my grandmother…

A 20-year detour is long enough. — PITTSBURGH, Pa., 9/11/21 It is 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2021, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am driving my 18-year-old son down from our home in the northern suburbs to the University of Pittsburgh campus, to a dorm not far from the elementary school that we both attended. …

Aging, death and the lies of 1980s bubblegum music. — “Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back.” — Tears for Fears, 1985 For Chris Wenzler (1967–2020). ALLISON PARK, Pa. Me, right now: standing in the front bathroom of the split-level house passed to me by my parents a decade ago. I glance in the mirror where, each weekday morning between 1982 and…

A 19th century-style ballgame and an iPhone app combine for a weekend trip back to the Civil War era. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, August 2023. AVELLA, Pa. The scratchy old pictures of 19th-century baseball have always felt like time portals to me — smudgy windows into the early childhood of a game I love, almost but not quite real. They are at once familiar and utterly…

From the train window, other angles on life slip into focus. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, August 2023. ABOARD THE AMTRAK PENNSYLVANIAN EAST OF PITTSBURGH The day is just beginning, and on this sunny Sunday morning all is still. Our train slices through the landscape in near silence, its rattling barely perceptible even to the sleepy travelers within its metal confines.

Finding God on the Pennsylvania Turnpike has, apparently, become too much of a safety hazard. — MILEPOST 129, Pennsylvania Turnpike I’VE BEEN DRIVING — or riding along — the Pennsylvania Turnpike since I was a kid in the early 1970s. And all during that time, one of the landmarks I always remember was the place we called, simply, “The Church on the Turnpike.” It is St. John the Baptist, a…

Do you believe in reincarnation? When it comes to inanimate objects, I do. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, June 2023. SOME YEARS AGO, when we lived overseas in Beijing, we had an apartment that was brimming with odd things we’d found fascinating and brought home for second lives — to the point that a Chinese decor magazine did a…

‘Star Trek: Picard’ concludes by reasserting what gradually became the franchise’s most potent hidden theme: Growing older is something to master, not dread. — From Unsorted but Significant on Substack. “They say `time is the fire in which we burn.’ .… Right now, Captain, my time is running out.” — Dr. Tolian Soran to Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, “Star Trek: Generations” (1994) “Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young, Doctor.” —…

In undoing the architecture of my late parents’ everyday lives and deciding what to discard, was I committing a small act of violence? — I STAND IN the mouth of Guardian Storage Unit No. 12104, on a swath of land just east of Pittsburgh. It is a sunny August afternoon in 2020, the height of the pandemic. …