Alex Lear edits the Sun Journal’s Opinion pages. His 6-year-old daughter Alaina is the fourth in a line of Lears with the initials A.L. Copy the Story Link.

Learics: Dad was a little bashful at times about singing with me, apologizing if he felt he was off key. Which was ironic, because I was honored to sing with him. As a child I'd hear him crooning ...

Learics: John, Paul, George and Ringo began together, changed the world of pop music forever and blessed countless lives, then arced out apart on their own lives' trajectories. Now they end ...

I'm glad to have the perspective of youth and older age. A happy medium. Middle of the road. A gradually graying guy wearing that old COOT shirt.

Alex Lear and his grandfather Ray Parsons at Ray’s home in Brewer, 2010. Lauren Lear. You never know when it will be your final conversation.

Alex Lear and his mother, Cynthia, in front of the Hatfield homestead in Arcadia, Nova Scotia, in 1999. Cynthia spent summers in Nova Scotia with her grandfather Clifford Hatfield, who grew up in ...

Alex Lear. We chose his name as something of a joke. Before we’d met Walter, before he was even born, my wife Lauren and I were figuring out a name for the bulldog we someday wanted to get.