Jerry Fabyanic's Blog

To train for a marathon, I ran uphill from Georgetown, which sits at 8500 feet above sea level, on the bike path paralleling the highway. When I got to Bakerville at about 10,000 feet, I paused to sip Gator Ade and enjoy a banana. I then continued onward for another mile or two before reversing course and heading back down. I estimated I ran about eighteen miles, which seems a lot except a marathon is twenty-six plus miles. Once I committed myself to completing a marathon, I knew I had to step up my training. What better way than to run uphill at high altitude? It was slow going, but speed wasn’t the goal. Legs, lungs, and heartrate were. It pushed me well beyond my comfort zone. I had done hard stuff before, but marathoning was by far the most challenging. And most rewarding mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter writes about his experience of doing something far more challenging than what I did: Thirty-three days on a caribou hunt on the northern Alaskan tundra. As you might imagine, his story entails all kinds of ordeals, all of which were new to Easter but not to […]

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The Constitution is the Law of the Land, but what it exactly says is a matter of debate. In Marbury v. Madison in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled the Supreme Court is the final arbiter when he declared, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Whether one likes it or not, it makes sense. After all, someone has to decide what the text of the Constitution and a law really says and means. Otherwise, we’d have a supreme ruler like they do in Iran, Russia, and China. The Constitution was preceded by two other founding documents: The Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. They were preceded in turn by England’s Magna Carta in 1215, the organizing agreement of the Dutch Republic in the late seventeenth century, and the Pilgrim’s Mayflower Compact in 1620. So there’s quite a history of formalizing governance through documentation. Laws, rules, and regulations are one thing. How citizens conduct themselves in the public sphere in a self-governing state is another. That’s what makes it all work. In the late eighteenth century, the English parliamentarian Edmund Burke spoke to that when he wrote, “Manners […]

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A dear friend recently shared the heartbreaking news about her daughter being diagnosed with a form of cancer. Having lost three siblings and several friends to the disease, I fully appreciate the toll it takes on the victim as well as on their family and friends. I now include the young woman in my meditations alongside a great-niece and four friends who are also fighting cancer. I read regularly about people in the wealthiest society in history who grocery “shop” at food banks and about folks who, because they’re unable to afford rent and health insurance, are doing without, whatever fashion doing without means. Then there are those dealing with loneliness and mental health issues, which are at epidemic levels, especially among our youth. We’re now enmeshed in Middle East War: Part IV.  In the early 1990s, the original—the Gulf War—was about preventing Saddam Hussein from seizing Kuwait’s oil fields. Mission accomplished. At the turn of the century, there were back-to-back sequels. Part II in Afghanistan was about hunting down the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. When we finally pulled out, the Taliban was still in charge. Part III was about seizing Hussein’s nuclear arsenal. It turned out he didn’t […]

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Were we as divided on May 4, 1970 as we are now? That was the day when Ohio National Guardsmen fired on unarmed anti-war protestors on the Kent State campus, killing four and wounding nine others. I’ve been asked a version of that question multiple times over the past year, most recently by my niece, Bernadette, who is a military veteran, student of history, and keen observer of behavior. Her question struck me not only because of its timeliness but also because she was only seven years old on then. Older Bomers can speak about the Kent State shootings anecdotally since they were adults then. Younger Boomers who weren’t mature enough to fully grasp the enormity of the event might have vague memories of it. That speaks to the power of the moment. Bernadette told me she remembers it well is because of her dad talking about it while he watched the news. She said she didn’t understand it, but whenever she sees an image of it resurface, she’s taken back to that time and place. Unlike Bernadette, I completely grasped the enormity of the shootings. I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh at the time. As a […]

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Bill Mazeroski died on February 20th. It’s unlikely many Americans had heard of Bill, aka Maz. But Pittsburgh Pirate fans remember him much to their delight. As well as New York Yankees’ fans to their eternal dismay. For it was Maz who rocked the world of baseball with a walk-off homerun in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. It was the swat heard ‘round the world. On February 22nd, the American men’s Olympic hockey team defeated the favored Canadians in overtime to win the gold. It was kind of déjà vu all over again because it happened on the forty-sixth anniversary of the Miracle on Ice in which the American team defeated the heavily favored Soviet Union team. The 2026 victory came three days after the women’s team pulled out their own thrilling, come-from-behind overtime victory against Canada. They trailed by a point with just over two minutes remaining, but captain Hilary Knight made U.S. Olympic history by scoring her fifteenth goal, sending the game into overtime. While both teams came out victorious, the games could’ve easily gone the other way because of how the opposing squads, men and women, were […]

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The winter Olympics are near the top of my favorite sporting events. What’s not to love? Ski racing and ice dancing among the plethora of competitions. That includes hockey. I’m not a huge hockey fan, but the USA’s defeat of the Soviet Union’s team in the 1980 Olympics remains etched in my memory as it likely is for many older Americans. The American team’s victory had profound effects and repercussions beyond the Olympics. One was that it helped revive the spirits of a nation in doubt. It gave us hope and reminded us that despite our woes, our best days weren’t behind us.. When the Olympics opened, America was still reeling from the twin pincers of inflation and gas shortages from the 1970s. Unemployment was soaring. Revolutionaries in Iran who had overrun the American embassy in 1979 still held the American diplomats and other personnel hostage. The Soviet Union was on the march, having just invaded Afghanistan, a colossal mistake America would repeat two decades later. In short, things looked dire. But life went on. The Winter Olympiad opened in February at Lake Placed, NY under a mixed spell of pride and a touch of fatalism about the seemingly hopelessly […]

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I took time off from writing essays so that I could focus on completing the MS of my forthcoming book. Task completed. It’s now in the hands and before the eyes of my editor and several beta readers. Concentrating on that solely had side benefits. It provided a respite from the other focus of my writing: Penning essays on topics related to our current socio-political situation. And it helped refresh my batteries. A writer’s version of coming up for air. During that time, the Broncos’ season ended in the slush at Mile High. Those who know me well know that I bleed orange. One friend thought I would’ve been twisted into knots over the loss, but I told him I wasn’t. For two reasons. The first was the mile-high hope many of us had for Bo Nix’s replacement, Jarret Stidham, to work his version of Bo Magic proved to be wishful thinking. The other was that I had already taken the long view. Overall, the Broncos’ season was successful despite falling short of winning the Super Bowl. For the first time in decades, their future is looking promising. With the completion of my book’s MS and the ending of the […]

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We’re never too old to learn or to be reminded about truths and principles that have been forgotten along the way. Oftentimes, they were originally picked up or gleaned from pithy lines in stories from our youth. One about personal power and action comes from the classic film, The Empire Strikes Back. Recall the scene in which Luke Skywalker crash-lands into a swamp on Dagobah and meets Yoda. At first, Luke is dismissive of Yoda, thinking him to be little more than an irritant. But as events unfold, Luke learns the truth of Yoda. He’s a Jedi master, of course, and begins teaching Luke the ways of the Jedi. But Luke, for all his skills and intelligence—he is, after all, a starfighter pilot—is not a patient learner. That character flaw, however, is rooted in something far deeper than his skillset: He doesn’t truly believe in himself. The big test comes when Luke tries to raise his ship from the swamp. When he sputters, he tries to justify his failure by saying the task—the ship—is too big, but Yoda has none of that and retorts that size matters not. When Luke shrugs and says that he’ll give it another try, rather […]

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I got an early gift from my sister. She had called to tell me to expect a package. As we chatted, I detected a bit of urgency in her voice when she told me to pick it up from the post office as soon as it arrived. Fortuitously, it got here earlier than the USPS had predicted. When I got it from the staff at the counter, I quipped that the USPS must’ve fed the pony extra oats. They laughed. When I opened it, my eyes lit up. I had gotten a gift more precious than all the foofaraws’ gold bullion and bitcoins: Pizzelles. I love pizzelles. There’s something about their black licorice flavor that melts my palate. But there’s more. They bring back warm memories of lunch at St. Colman’s. My friend, David, who was of Italian descent, like me carried his lunch to school. His lunch pail was pewter gray and rounded at the top where a thermos was tucked. Mine was a brown paper bag that sometimes contained only a ketchup-and-mayo or scrambled egg sandwich on homemade bread wrapped in wax paper. I’d refold the bag over and over until it wore out and stuff it into […]

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In the beginning, the United Sates was divided sectionally between free states and states where slavery was lawful. But the border eventually became blurred, then obliterated. After the war with Mexico, slave owners sought to expand their power into the territories Mexico ceded to the United States in 1848. Then in 1857, they saw their power substantially increased by the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision that declared slave owners could take “their property” wherever they wanted throughout the United States. The stage was set. “All hell,” to use General William Tecumseh Sherman’s description of war, soon broke loose. The carnage in the Civil War was beyond mind-numbing. The approximate 623,000 battle deaths exceeds the total of all other wars in American history. Many combatants died of malnutrition, disease, and brutality in prisoner-of-war camps, like the infamous Andersonville, which presaged the Nazi concentration camps. Stark images of the dead in contorted positions, of the wounded, many having endured amputations, lying in makeshift hospitals, and of emaciated prisoners of war, along with images of the amputated arms and legs dumped by wheelbarrows in pits, shock the sensibilities and unsettle consciences of the morally sound.   In the midst of the carnage […]

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