Larry the K's Lineup

  Larry, Lynne, Arianna in China in 1997. A quarter-century can seem like a long time, but the 25 years that have elapsed since my wife and I adopted our first child, Arianna, from China have gone by in a flash. Today, our daughter is a teacher, having graduated from Bridgewater State University in 2018, but in 1997, she was a toddler waiting for her forever family to take her out of China, which at the time was losing thousands of its daughters yearly due to that government’s one-child policy, which wouldn’t be ended until 2015. In what now seems like an eternity ago, my wife and I traveled to China to adopt Arianna in the fall of 1997. This article --- which appeared in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA on Tuesday, Oct. 25 --- looks back on that trip of a lifetime. The column follows, and the link to the column on the newspaper’s website is: https://www.thesunchronicle.com/opinion/columns/larry-kessler-the-journey-of-a-lifetime-indeed/article_925e991f-b63a-54cd-8589-8929d9292...

With inflation running higher than it has in four decades --- and with retailers under more pressure than ever with staff shortages due to supply chain and post-pandemic pressures --- I thought I'd share two positive retail experiences that I had today (Friday, Oct. 14). I went to the Emerald Square mall in North Attleboro in search of a specific color shirt (lavender) for an upcoming wedding. I went to JC Penney first because I had a gift card to that store, but after looking for 10 minutes or so, I couldn't locate a shirt of that color. So I asked a clerk in the men's store for help, and he went out of his way to help me, something that's no longer a given these days. This gentleman looked for a shirt from the racks, but didn't find even a color close to lavender, but he didn't stop there. He spent a few minutes searching online for an appropriate dress shirt, but didn't find an exact match. He offered to order the one he found, but he also suggested that ...

Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom, in the team’s season-ending press conference on Thursday, Oct. 6, pledged to make signing potential free agent Xander Bogaerts (who could opt out of his contract five days after the World Series) and Rafael Devers (who will be a free agent after the 2023 season) to long-term contracts a top priority this off-season, and he had better follow through or run the risk of getting fired. Bloom needs to do that if he ever wants to dispel the notion that he’s been trying to turn the Sox into Tampa Bay North, a notion that the former Rays executive has, with some justification, been accused of trying to do since he took over in 2019 and promptly dumped Mookie Betts to the Los Angeles Dodgers for three average players. (Sorry, but Alex Verdugo is an average, at best, outfielder and his rightfield defense has been mediocre to awful since he was made a right-fielder after the trade deadline. Connor Wong may one day make a good catcher, but he’s not th...

Max Volterra (Photo courtesy of The Sun Chronicle)       Max Volterra is shown in 2009. (Photo courtesy of The Sun Chronicle) The passing on Monday (Oct. 3) of Attleboro attorney and former state and city official Max Volterra at the age of 86 was a n extremely sad loss for the greater Attleboro community. The man was a mensch, as the story by Staff Writer George Rhodes, on Volterra’s death, published in The Sun Chronicle on Wednesday, Oct. 5, noted. (Read the full story at this link to the newspaper’s website: https://www.thesunchronicle.com/news/local_news/max-volterra-pillar-of-the-attleboro-community-dies-at-86/article_e4293cc9-e636-5cb8-b789-52cc5341b737.html) Volterra, as Rhodes wrote, served the city as a Ward 2 city councilor, city solicitor, state representative, board member for the office of community development, and a member of the Attleboro Redevelopment Authority and the election commission. He also served his synagogue , Congregation Agudas Achim for ...