Beating Traffic: Time to Get Unstuck
This book is dedicated to all the people who value their time as a gift to be cherished and who view very minute stuck in a traffic jam as a minute removed from their lives. It is also dedicated to all those who value the health of the Planet Earth as a responsibility which all individuals must share. Traffic congestion is not new, but it has gone from being an exceptional event for a few to an everyday event for the many.
Francesco: The Rosati Family Legacy of Masseggio
Francesco Vincento Arcangelo Rosati was a simple man who had a complex life, like most of us. When he was a young boy growing up on a farm in the hills of central Italia, he had no idea that he would be taken on a journey from his pastoral home to the coalfields of the eastern United States. He emigrated to America , but unlike many of his countrymen and fellow Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he did not leave home to seek riches and a new life. He had a comfortable life in a city in southwest Luxembourg where he and his wife, Rosa, lived with their two children, Celeste and Elena. Circumstances, not dreams, pushed him farther away from his ancestral home and his and Rosa’s families. Once in America, however, he seized the opportunity to build something better than he had in pre-war Europe. He found the means to feed his family, a family that grew when Maria and Jolanda arrived, to build a new homestead, to see his children happily marry and prosper, and to become a grandfather, whom we called Nonno Checco (pronounced cake-oh).
Italian or American
When I came home for a visit a few weeks later, my sister, her husband and I sat at their dining room table. On the table was the manila envelope she had found. She said they did not know what to make of its contents and did not know what to do with it. They thought of throwing it away, but felt I should see it first. I opened the envelope and took out a book, or something that looked like a book with a soft cover. The thick paper cover and the pages were yellowed with age. Along the top I could recognize the words ‘Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi’ and ‘East Brooklyn’. Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi was the name of the town in Italy from where our father’s parents had emigrated as teenagers, before they were married. At the bottom of the cover, in small capital letters was printed Lawrence Sena, my father’s name. In large letters was the title ‘Natale di Roma’. My sister said it meant ‘The Birth of Rome’. I turned to the first page and immediately saw the source of my sister’s concern. S.E. BENITO MUSSOLINI called out from the middle of the page. Something happened on Sunday, the 23rd of April, 1933 at the Elks Club in Brooklyn, New York that had something to do with Benito Mussolini, and our father had produced the program for this event. A few pages later there was a photograph if Il Duce and a letter from him on the facing page. Further on was a full-page photo of our father with Lorenzo Sena beneath it.
The Coal Men
It is two thirty-five p.m. on Monday, November 22nd 1965 in a town in Carbon County in the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The roof in a section of one of the local coal mines has collapsed, sealing off four rooms and trapping six miners. One of them, Nicco, is unconscious, lying face down on the mine floor in the sealed off section. The lower half of his body is covered with rubble. He has worked together with the other five men for the past two years.
The Lumberyard Boys Breakfast Club
During the summer of 1965, three boys who are about to turn eighteen are working at a lumberyard in the town of Drake’s Crossing, Pennsylvania. For two of them, it is a summer job between high school graduation and the next step in their respective lives. Franky wants to be a professional football player, and Nicky wants to be a jet pilot. For one of them, Tony, who dropped out of school at the age of fifteen, it is his next step. Several years later, after Franky’s dream is crushed, Nicky has spent three years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and Tony gets a new life, they decide to meet once a week, on Saturday mornings, for breakfast and conversation. They form the Lumberyard Boys Breakfast Club and discuss what is happening in the world around them, both near and far.
There will be three books in The Lumberyard Boys Breakfast Club. Two of them are complete. The first begins in 1965 and ends in May 2023. The second begins on election day in November 2024 and ends in January 2026, just after the one-year anniversary of the second presidential term of the person who won the election. It was written in real time, as the world turned and events occurred. The third book will begin on election day in November 2026 and run until there is a logical place to end.
We Are All Prisoners of War
I wrote this book to understand the effects of wars on our lives. I graduated from high school in 1965 and I took that year as the starting point of my story. For boys born in the few years following the end of the Second World War, 1965 was our first collective life and death moment, like 1941 for our fathers or 1914-1917 for their fathers. President Lyndon B. Johnson told us in the summer of ’65 that we were going to beat the Viet Cong, and as many able-bodied men as the country could muster would go over to Vietnam to make sure we did.
Boys turning eighteen had to register for U.S. Selective Service, the draft, one month before their birthday. I turned eighteen in July of 1965. We had six alternatives for how we could respond to this requirement. We could enlist in one of the five branches of the military and hope we weren’t sent to Vietnam—unless we wanted to go to Vietnam to prove something to ourselves or someone else, and then we could request to go to Vietnam. I had friends who did that. We could apply for a deferment, including for attending college or having dependent children or parents. I was accepted to a college, so I had a deferment—but when we arrived at college in the autumn of 1965, all freshman in the entire country had to take what was called a War Board Test, which would determine if we truly belonged in college. I don’t know anyone who took the test and failed. We could take the physical, and if we passed, we might be sent to Vietnam or sent anywhere else there were military bases, unless we were accepted in a state’s National Guard. Being accepted in a state’s National Guard did not mean you were not sent to Vietnam, since 7,000 National Guardsmen served in Vietnam, but the chances were much lower. Many of my high school classmates were in this category. We could take the physical and if we failed, we could still be called up until we reached the age of thirty-five, and then we would have to take the physical again. We could apply for conscientious objector status, but that wasn’t a very successful path to take because conscientious objector status was only granted to those who could demonstrate “sincerity of belief in religious teachings combined with a profound moral aversion to war.” Or we could become ‘draft dodgers’ and head to Canada, Sweden or somewhere else where we might be given sanctuary. I didn’t know any draft dodgers, but I met several much later in life who fled to Sweden and stayed there.
When I graduated from college in 1969, I was called up for my physical, which I failed because of injuries I incurred playing football in high school and college. My third concussion in my junior year of college ended my varsity football activities. One of my college classmates and football teammates died of a concussion he suffered during pre-season training the year before my third concussion, so the team physicians were very careful. I never had to decide what I would have done had I passed. I cannot say for sure, but I would probably have done what most of my friends and cousins did: volunteer for the Navy or Air Force or tried to join the National Guard. Going to Vietnam in 1969 would have been my last choice. With my deferral, I spent the next three years in graduate school, lived and worked in London for a year, then eighteen in the Boston area, two in Florida, and since 1993, have lived in Sweden with my wife, Britt Marie.
The characters in this book are fictional, but the events they are experiencing are very real. The town which is the setting for the story, Drake’s Crossing, is fictional, but it could be any town anywhere in the country in 1965. Any similarities to real people and real places are purely coincidental.
Revenge or Retribution
The book is dedicated to my dear wife of forty-one years, Britt Marie, who battled cancer for seven years and finally lost the battle on the 28th of June 2025. She was an inspiration to me in everything I did since the first time we met in Stockholm in June 1982, and she will continue to be an inspiration to me for the remainder of my life.
This book starts on the 5th of November 2024, election day in the United States, and ends on the 24th of January 2026, one year and four days from the day Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second attempt to be President. It was written in real time, as the actual events occurred during the year. During that time, the Breakfast Club members met at their clubhouse for their weekly get-togethers, and they met and talked in other places among themselves, with their family membes, and with others, about what was happening in their country and in the rest of the world. They also talked about what was happening in their local area, about how, suddenly and without any forewarning, life in Drake’s Crossing was turned upside down by a proposal from a Native American tribe in New York that would change the nature of the entire community and its surrounding area if it were approved. Will the result of the election have any significant effect on what happens in Drake’s Crossing and to all of the Lumberyard Boys’ families, or will the events occurring in the home patch of the Lumber Yard Boys have lives of their own?
Slow Fishing the Fresh Waters of Italy
Slow fishing combines the joys of fishing with enjoyment of the culture—especially the food— in the area where one is fishing. It takes inspiration from ‘slow food’ with an added dimension: Live to eat and fish, and encourage traditional gastronomy, local food production and the promotion of sustainable fishing in streams, rivers and lakes. Members of the Slow Fishing Club are encouraged to share their experiences in the club’s meeting room provided by this site. Our only maxim is that the best start, middle and end of a day spent fishing are meals shared with friends, family or both.
Wienerbröd: In search of a pastry’s origin
Is it Danish, French, Austrian, American, or truly Swedish?
What does an American—or any foreigner, for that matter—think he is doing writing about the most Swedish of Swedish pastries: wienerbröd? Isn’t that like a Frenchman trying to describe the nuances of America’s doughnuts, or a Mexican explaining how to make the perfect English steamed syrup sponge pudding? The principal qualification that I can offer for waxing lyrical (with enthusiasm and vigor) on wienerbröd is experience: I have been tasting, testing, and enjoying this delicacy for forty-nine years and counting, which is quite a bit more than one-half of my life at this writing.
I cannot speak for my British friends when it comes to allowing a foreigner to talk about their ‘puddings’, but as an American by birth and a Swede by choice, I would be perfectly comfortable with a foreign-born American, even a Frenchman, who had been a serious student of the doughnut for four or five decades, writing books, poems or songs about the fried dough bomb. So, as a U.S.-born, naturalized Swede as of 1999, who began his love affair with wienerbröd during his first visit to Sweden in 1977, I will continue.
Wienerbröd is a Swedish pastry, first made by Swedish pastry makers over one hundred years ago, and perfected by successive generations of Swedish pastry makers to this very day. This is not the story you will find if you perform an online search with wienerbröd (pronounced vee-ner-brrd) as the key word, or look up the word in a Swedish-to-English dictionary, or even read about its history in a book on pastry baking. Wienerbröd, which literally means ‘Vienna bread’, is translated to ‘Danish’ in Swedish-to-English dictionaries, and in books there is a tale about bakers imported from Vienna to Copenhagen in the 1850s when Danish bakers went out on strike, and these strike breakers are credited with making the first wienerbröd. This sounded fishy to me the first time I read it. So, mostly because wienerbröd has been my favorite coffee accompaniment since I took my first bite of one almost fifty years ago, I decided to try to uncover the pastry’s true origin.