Ponderings by Dan Ponder

Auburn fans found themselves in an unusual place during the College Football National Championship game on Monday night.  How do you pull for your greatest rival in such a contest?  What do you do if both teams are your greatest rivals? I moved to Georgia just a month after I graduated from Auburn University.  For…

To do or not to do.  That is the question, to paraphrase the famous line from Hamlet by William Shakespeare.  In my case, I am thinking about the New Year resolutions that I typically write about the first week in January of each year.  More specifically, I am thinking about the ways that I keep…

We had never really heard of a Coronavirus, Covid, much less variants of any kind when we boarded our plane for Paris.  We were on our way to the world-famous Louvre Museum to see an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s work on the occasion of his 500th birthday.  It did not disappoint. The exhibit drew…

The year was 1961.  Sixty years ago, to be exact.  There was a small rectangular box wrapped under the Christmas tree.  The tag said to Granddaddy from Pee Wee.    Pee Wee was my first great dog.  She came to our house as a puppy when I was in the first grade.  Granddaddy was my…

This week begins the what I have come to think of as the lull before Christmas.  Calm before the storm might be a more appropriate description.   Some 30,000 plus students attending Auburn University, or at least most of them, have finished their exams and either graduated or left for home.  Many have jobs and…

If you are going to use the word, “truth”, in the title of an article then you better start off by being honest with your readers.  I am not much of a country music fan.   That is probably not a surprise if you knew how many years of classical piano I studied.  On top…

A funny thing happened Sunday after Auburn’s heartbreaking loss to Alabama this past Saturday.  Riding down the road and not wanting to listen to the talking heads dissect a game that I did not want to think about any longer, I switched from Sirius XM to FM radio.  The first five stations I dialed up…

It is time for my yearly Thanksgiving column, where I try to briefly outline some of the things I am thankful for during the past year.  Some years are easier than others, though there is never a shortage of blessings if we look hard enough. 2021 has not been a year without challenges.  Covid-19 remained…

Many people have heard the phrase “living on the wrong side of the tracks”.  It has generally been used to refer to the location of lower-class neighborhoods within a community.   Sometimes it was the industrial part of town that might have that distinction.  Often, though, the “other side of the tracks” referred to people…