The Saturday Evening Post January/February 2020

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood,” wrote Thomas Wolfe in You Can’t Go Home Again. But some people can’t go back because they’ve never escaped the place where they were born: the family, experiences, comforts — and sometimes the horrors — of those early years are always with them. Jon Gingerich, whose story “Thornhope, Indiana” (page 56) took first prize in this year’s Great American Fiction Contest, offers a powerful narrative of a young man growing up in rural Indiana who determines to run away after his brother dies in a horrific farm accident. But, as he discovers, breaking loose from one’s past is much more difficult than it at first seems. The editors at the Post and the outside judges picked “Thornhope, Indiana”…

Richard Zoglin In the spring of 1956, Elvis Presley’s star was on the rise, at least with teens. But when the 21-year-old debuted at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas on April 23, 1956, the middle-aged crowd, according to Newsweek, “sat through Presley as if he were a clinical experiment.” Ouch. “Elvis was something new — not what the Vegas crowd was looking for,” says Zoglin, who writes about that event in “When Elvis Flopped in Vegas” (page 36), regarded “as a rare misstep in a year of meteoric success.” Daniel Pink If you say to someone, “I’ve got good news and bad news,” which do you deliver first? “I’ve always led with the good news first,” says the author of “Good News about Bad News” (page 32), thinking that telling them…

Cold Comfort I’m not the biggest fan of winter, but the Nov/Dec cover painting Winter Wonderland by artist Robin Moline filled me with such a peaceful feeling. Alice Folk, Butler, Pennsylvania Getting a Late Start “Late Bloomers” (Nov/Dec) was a wonderful article that really struck a chord for me. The pressure for early success left me feeling very depressed throughout my 20s and 30s, but now at 50 I am finally putting creative pieces together. Andrew Parks, online comment Very few of us will ever match the success of J.K. Rowling or Tom Brady no matter what we do. However, the main point is well taken; expecting to achieve too much success too soon is a setup for disappointment. Bill Dyszel, online comment Great Expectations “Lots of folks will peck out an essay, declare themselves writers, and expect the…

The heart bestows life and death. It also instigates metaphor: It is a vessel that fills with meaning. The heart has always been linked to bravery. Even the word courage derives from the Latin cor, which means “heart.” A person with a small heart is easily frightened. Discouragement or fear is expressed as a loss of heart. The richness and breadth of human emotions are perhaps what distinguish us most from other animals, and throughout history and across many cultures, the heart has been thought of as the place where those emotions reside. The idea that the heart is the locus of emotions has a history spanning from the ancient world. But this symbolism has endured. If we ask people which image they most associate with love, there is no doubt that…

You’ve gotta love holidays. Many people say that. I’m not one of them. I acknowledge holidays and I honor your right to celebrate them, including the truly absurd ones. But I don’t have to embrace them. You cannot make me. Among other things, we have way too many: official national holidays, religious holidays, and all those kooky holidays invented mainly to enrich merchants. You want to go all gooey over National Pepperoni Pizza Day? Fine, but don’t expect me to send you a greeting card. So here we are, with the big winter holidays just behind us. (And I ask you, seriously, is Christmas still a religious holiday in America or is it chiefly a gift-giving festival that drives personal debt?) Valentine’s Day — not to be confused with Sweetest Day, which…

With our two sons grown and gone, and retirement a handful of years away (assuming a hand has six fingers), my wife and I are getting rid of the stuff we’ve spent the last 40 years accumulating. We rented for the first 15 years of our marriage, desperately wanting our own home but unable to afford one. Now we own three — the house we live in, the house we intend to live in when we can no longer climb stairs, and the farmhouse my wife lived in as a child. It isn’t cheap owning three homes, and I’d much rather spend our money on more important things like motorcycles, but we’ll probably die still owning three houses, sticking our sons with the trouble of deciding what to do with…