I think we can say scientifically that the universe perks up when we approach new ventures. The data is in. The universe gets interested. You gotta be careful out there. Before I left for this trip, I was rushing around but paused to eat some dry stir-fry on the couch while watching […]
A friend texted recently to say he had bought a new yacht. Ok, I said. He asked if I would like to help him transit it from Fort Pierce, Florida, to his home port of Havre de Grace, Maryland, a trip of about a thousand miles up the East Coast, in the […]
Craig L. Symonds’s The US Navy: A Concise History (Oxford UP 2016) is a book that in its brevity (116 pages), simple texture, and insights could have been written only by a master of the subject. Symonds is emeritus at the US Naval Academy and was a visiting professor at the US Naval War […]
Some people go to Vegas. I gamble on florists, who must keep their stock impeccably fresh by leaving lovely flowers in the Dumpster for me to find. Tacky, yes. But there is never any goop or crud in their Dumpsters, just lovely long stems, a few slimy or blackened but most still crisp […]
Matthew Korbfort called me when he was still Matthew Stenfort. I answered the phone in mild amazement. Matthew was in his early twenties and, like everyone his age I knew, he never called anyone. He had never called me. If he was not so young, I would have been full of dread that […]
Back in 2021 I wrote a piece about First Lieutenant Amy Nickles, an American army nurse from Georgia who was awarded the Bronze Star in World War Two and saw as much or more of the European Theater as famed writer Ernie Pyle. I became interested in her because I could find […]
“I just hope the coffee roaster’s still there,” I say as we exit the highway. “Why wouldn’t it be?” asks my husband, whose world contains fewer neurotic imaginings. I shrug. “Things change from year to year.” I remind him about the other little coffeehouse, now vanished, and the bookstore we loved…. We have […]
On a website since removed from public view, Art Garfunkel mapped with approximate dates the path he walked from his apartment on the Upper East side of Manhattan to Oregon, dating his walk across parts of Pennsylvania as April 1984. That means the following incident would have transpired in April 1984, […]
Every so often the forces of new scientific findings and opinion columns align to produce a certain sense of dread and unease. In this case, that dread and that unease are acute if you believe in the power and pleasure of a good cup of coffee. Yes, there are myriad other […]
You would think we were planning an expedition to the moon. First I researched ancient and medieval narratives of eclipse, read the scientific explanation of the crimson ring we might see (hydrogen in the chromosphere) and the erratic behavior of wildlife, and got sidetracked by solar wind and the music of the spheres […]
