Early in our childhood, and thanks mostly to the iconic Fred Rogers, adults taught us that people make a neighborhood. Midway through the journey of a natural disaster, however, we learn the hard lesson that it is a neighborhood’s trees we commune with in a deeper sense. The cast and angle of light on your […]
An old friend and roommate once identified a phenomenon important to recognize: Crap transference. This is when people give you things they own, apparently with good intentions, except you do not need or want them, and in fact may not have known they existed. Maybe some unused picture frame made them think […]
People are hard to know; meaning comes dear. I was out walking the trail. A bridge that was being demolished blocked my usual route, so I headed in the opposite direction, toward what might as well have been a foreign town, though it was just a few miles away. Humidity was back […]
It was the first time I heard a bosun’s whistle while lying on a rack aboard a U.S. Navy vessel. After we had been called to attention by the sharp sound of the whistle, it was our captain speaking—the commanding officer of the USS Saipan. Much to my surprise, he was […]
Before the president of the United States began publicly musing about developing the Gaza Strip into a hip resort town, a sort of Las Vegas in the Middle East, I could claim only one small gift of second sight. I was driving west on Highway 40 in St. Louis one day in […]
Some online quizzes ask you to choose from a list of things you may have done at some point in your life. These are meant to make you feel brave (skydived), old-school knowledgeable (used a paper map and compass), or experienced (traveled outside the country). Each affirmative answer is a point, […]
I screwed up my Facebook feed, on purpose, in 2016. It has never really recovered. Back then I was writing about the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota, where thousands of non-Native veterans from across the United States went to support the Lakota-Dakotas’ right not to have a massive pipeline cross the […]
Pete Hegseth, the United States’ new secretary of defense, was still in elementary school when the Soviet Union crumbled. Unlike people born after 1991, he must have some memory of the Cold War and the demonization of Russians by the American government, especially our military. But when he graduated from Princeton […]
It was about six months after the death of my mother that I finally mustered the courage to organize all the boxed and scattered family photos she left behind. Walking into a boutique, upscale stationery store, I spotted an embossed leather photo album hand-crafted in Italy. Its price shot way over my […]
My gal pal has a type. Not a type she prefers, but rather a type that prefers her. Her appeal to this type of guy is so reliable that when she sees a man of this type—most often, these days, in a grocery store—she begins to prepare herself for the eventual approach. […]