Tom Hallman: It's just a dress. Only a few yards of limp fabric on a hanger. Take the finest, most expensive silk ever spun and there's still no life. And certainly no magic.
What a dress always needs is a girl.
A girl in a dress takes a father's breath away. He turns from the television when his daughter walks into the room and is struck by how quickly the years have slipped away, gone in a heartbeat when he wasn't paying attention to all the changes.
Nigel Duara with a weather story: We stifle a yawn. We cough politely. We glare at our mates and start to obtrusively pack up the scrapers and gloves.
"Well, winter, it's been so nice having you, really, and we're so happy you could come and please, please do call next time you're in town, we can't wait to have you back, but, well, it is getting a bit late and we do have to get back to life without shovels and bags of salt and waking up every morning to yet another toe-freezing, nose-stuffing, frostbitten ...
One of the originals, Joel Rawson, is retiring: Joel P. Rawson, who inspired a generation of Providence Journal reporters to embrace nonfiction storytelling, a novelistic style of print journalism that he helped introduce and perfect, is retiring on April 29 as the newspaper's senior vice president and executive editor. Rawson, 64, who lives in Burrillville with Janeen, his wife of 40 years, intends to pursue his passions: flying and writing. ...
"He knew how to instill excitement in the craft of nonfiction writing; how to make what happened in, say, the Lower Arctic section of West Warwick seem as relevant and as dynamic as anything occurring in Manhattan or in Boston," said Dan Barry, who was a member of The Journal's 1994 Pulitzer-winning team and is now with The New York Times. "I wrote a magazine piece once, about a particularly troubling arson case in Providence, and he sent me an encouraging note. The note pretty much changed my life."
And on that note, Dan Barry: FRANKFORT, Ky. — After the murder, the body was swaddled in bed sheets and a Mickey Mouse blanket. It was placed in a van, driven far from any road in rural Henry County and dumped in a narrow creek bed, just as another July day was dawning.
The summer of 1998 baked on. Autumn arrived to rain-swell the creek and send skull bits floating down the bed of silt and stone. Winter followed to skim the mesh of gray twigs and pale bones with a veil of ice. Then, one February morning, two hunters running their beagles were stopped cold in their tracks; the living, finally, took notice.
Soon came Dr. Emily Craig, Kentucky's well-respected forensic anthropologist, along with County Coroner Jimmy Pollard and a couple of state police detectives, all tutored in her lesson not to treat crime scenes as Easter egg hunts. She put on her latex gloves and thick boots, got down into the creek, and began handing up pieces of a broken human being, the evidence already shouting to her that this was a man shot dead in the head.
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