I suppose I should have known how appealing an old truck would be to some other people by my own reaction when I saw it at the curb. Ol’ Blue, an F-150 from the mid-1990s, was sitting with a For Sale sign in its windshield when I ran into a neighborhood from the […]
“What a horrible thing yellow is,” muttered Edgar Degas. Granted, he loved painting ballerinas, and one sees few yellow tutus. But Degas is on to something more, because yellow has a weird place in the pantheon. It is the color of sunshine and daffodils, and it stands for warmth, joy, and clarity—yet […]
My life, of late, is a bowl of cherries. Often with a dollop of vanilla yogurt on top. I steal them at the grocery store, just one per bag, to avoid the crushing disappointment of learning too late that they are sour. Unlike soured humans, who tend to advertise their disgust, […]
Some of my earliest memories, I realize now, are actually of time. The invisible wind making a wave that approached in the prairie grass; dappled light under the tree that changed with the incidence of the sun. The fatigue of long summer days—heat, humidity, playing with friends, water breaks. Time for this and […]
“Bored, I’m so bored,” Billie Eilish sings. “I’m so bored, so bored.” Were he alive, Bertrand Russell would jump to his feet to applaud her. “Boredom as a factor in human behavior has received, in my opinion, far less attention than it deserves,” he wrote in The Conquest of Happiness, published […]
Landlocked and wheezing pollen, my body misses the sea. More specifically, it misses stretching out, near naked, on wet, hard-packed sand and listening to the sea. The splurgiest vacation we ever took was to Bermuda, and that was the only time I ever wept when it was time to go home […]
Tradition has it that Charles II slighted Hemyock Castle because Parliament held it against his father in the English Civil War. Slighting, in the archaic sense, was to ruin an opponent’s possessions for their intended purposes. It did not mean razing every building or salting the fields until barren, and it was done […]
New in the Associated Press Stylebook, bible for all journalists: “Avoid the terms child-free and childless other than in direct quotes essential to the story. They may be viewed as loaded or demeaning. If you must mention a newsmaker’s parental status and if it is relevant, use a neutral description such as […]
“A badly made sentence is a judgment pronounced upon its perpetrator,” wrote William Gass, “and even one poor paragraph indelibly stains the soul.” He set his course for a Platonic purity (though he was far too Baroque a soul to achieve it, his sentences jammed with clauses and effusions of metaphor and […]
My mom, who raised me alone, said when I was a kid that she would come to every game if I wanted to play Little League, but I knew how she felt about team sports, which was the same as how she felt about unrefrigerated potato salad at the picnic. Besides, we lived […]
