Last month the United States Senate confirmed Anne-Imelda Radice, Ph.D., as the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services -- a presidential appointment -- which leads me to ask: What's a guy got to do to get interviewed by the FBI in this joint?

Radice lives part-time in Lincoln, and so some of my neighbors were interviewed by the FBI as part of the background check. But did the feds ever knock on my door? Nope. And so I am just a little bit hurt.

Granted, I couldn't pick Dr. Radice out of a police lineup of museum professionals. But when someone in my town is put in charge of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, I expect to be in the loop.

The Institute, for those among us who do not collect curator trading cards, is the primary source of federal support for our nation's 122,000 libraries and 15,000 museums. According to the organization's Web site, the group also does a whole lot of empowering, enhancing, sustaining and convening (yes, convening).

But I also wanted to be interviewed because I think FBI agents are incredibly cool. And when they're played by Jodie Foster -- think Clarice Starling from "The Silence of the Lambs" -- they are both cool and hot. I hate to show my age, but when I was a little boy I watched the old "F.B.I" television show with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. faithfully. I can still hum the deep bum-bum-baa-bum that marked the starting music. I hum it badly, but I hum everything badly.

I might actually know more people in this town who were interviewed by the FBI about my neighbor than who have actually met her. Vaneasa Stearns owns the General Store in the center of the village, and so (of course) she got to be interviewed.

"At first I thought the agent was a liquor inspector," Stearns says. "She had a definite presence about her. She had the look of someone who was highly trained." The agent flashed Stearns her badge, and then asked if there was someplace private they could talk. Stearns took her to the unassuming supply closet behind the counter, where Stearns told her everything she knew about Dr. Radice, which was ... nothing. Stearns has never set eyes on the new director.

Nevertheless, Stearns still admits the experience "was really fun. It would have been more fun if Tom Selleck came in. He's cute. The next time I'm interviewed, I want the agent to look like Tom -- though that's no reflection on the agent who interviewed me."

Just for the record, Selleck did appear in a 1973 episode of "The F.B.I.," so although it is highly unlikely that Stearns will ever be questioned by Tom Selleck, Selleck has probably met Efrem Zimbalist Jr. He might even have interviewed him.

Stearns' husband, Dan, also spent time with the FBI. He's an electrician and had done some work at Dr. Radice's home. He hadn't met her either, but he still got to see a badge flashed in his direction and taken outside for questioning.

Kate McGowan, an executive with the United Way of Addison County, came home one afternoon and found a card waiting for her from the FBI. "That got my attention," she said. McGowan once was the subject of an FBI background check herself because she had an internship with the Internal Revenue Service when she was 18. Her work these days with the United Way is clearly a sort of atonement.

Unlike Dan and Vaneasa Stearns, McGowan actually does know Dr. Radice. She and the presidential appointee aren't exactly girls in the hood, but they have had amicable conversations that have transcended brief discussions of the weather. "The FBI interview made me feel like a good citizen. There's a real disconnect between what goes on with the federal government and what we do daily as citizens. In that regard, it was very eye-opening," she said.

Well, I want to feel like a good citizen, too!

So, the next time one of my neighbors receives a prestigious presidential appointment and the FBI is doing a background check, will I remember this slight? Not a prayer. Especially if I get to meet Jodie Foster.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 2, 2006.)

I just spent a weekend on Planet Testosterone. I'd heard a great deal about this world, and I remembered it well from my own childhood. But I have a daughter, and so I hadn't realized that Planet Testosterone is a place where middle-aged knees go to die, and if you don't keep moving, you risk being finished off like a wounded zebra on the African savannah.

I was visiting my friends Adam and Rhea in Los Angeles, and they have two boys: 8-year-old Max and 4 1/2-year-old Ross. They are wonderful children, and Ross might be the only child I have ever met who has hair as soft as velour. But almost every waking moment that Adam and Ross and Max and I were together, we had in our hands a baseball, a basketball or the little pingpong-like ball for the Foosball table. When we weren't actually throwing, tossing or spiking those balls, we were watching other people throw, toss or spike balls because there were a lot of sports with balls to be watched that weekend.

And, just for the record, when our hands were actually free of orbs, we were giving each other high-fives and low-fives or banging our heads together because someone in the room or the driveway or the gym or on the television set had just done something impressive with an orb.

John Gray was right when he said that women are from Venus. But men are not really from Mars. We're from the Patrick Gymnasium. Or Fenway Park. Or the sections of Dick's Sporting Goods that specialize in spherical objects.

Now, Max and Ross are great kids, and I had a fabulous time. But as a dad of a daughter -- a girl with a capital G -- I have spent most of the past decade on Girl World. I know there are spectacular female athletes competing in sports with orbs: There were a pair of 7-year-old girls on Max's basketball team who could start for the 2006 Knicks. But it has been a long while since I spent serious time in a world where there was actually a clothes hamper-sized basket filled with nothing but balls.

When I was growing up, I knew the Planet Testosterone well. My brother is five years older than me, but in hindsight, he was always preternaturally patient. There was no sport with a ball he wouldn't play with me. We would spend hours together playing wiffle ball with the garage door as strike zone and backdrop, basketball and a version of one-on-one football in which you could pass to yourself. (This served him a tad better than it did me, since he was anywhere from 6 inches to a foot taller than I was.) When it rained, we would play a board game indoors called Denny McLain Live Action Baseball, in which the pitcher used a spring to launch a wooden baseball at a wooden bat 7 or 8 inches away. (My brother perfected a curve that arced away from the bat but fell into the strike zone.)

I don't think I ever beat him at anything. Even when we were grown men living in different parts of New York City, we would meet every Saturday afternoon so he could beat me at tennis.

Max and Ross, of course, are separated by three years, not five. And so it is possible that Ross won't lose with the impressive consistency to Max that I did to my older brother.

But that doesn't matter: My sense is that Ross will always come back for more, regardless of how soundly or how consistently he is defeated. It really isn't about winning or losing in a house of two boys. All it takes to align the stars above Planet Testosterone is an available ball.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 9, 2006.)

It was 25 years ago this Easter Weekend that the church in Lincoln burned to the ground. In the middle of the night on Good Friday, hours after the last candles had been extinguished following the Maundy Thursday service, old electrical wiring ignited a part of the propane gas line, and within moments the sanctuary -- built in 1863 -- was ablaze.

The minister, a 29-year-old pastor named David Wood, who had been in town less than two years and was still getting to know his very first congregation, sprinted the few hundred yards that separated the parsonage from the church, arriving just as the tall, elegant stained glass windows blew out into the night air.

The old building was already a raging bonfire, and so the volunteer firefighters worked hard to save the nearby houses and barns -- including the 1898 Victorian I live in today that sits right next door. By sunrise, the small mound in the center of the village on which the church had resided for well over a century held only an empty shell: a dispiriting heap of smoldering ash in the midst of a cluster of charred and blackened 10-inch timbers. The pews and the altar table and the chairs in the choir loft had fed the flames and now were long gone; the hymnals and Bibles had probably been consumed in the very first minutes.

Today, a newcomer to Lincoln wouldn't suspect that the village church hadn't been here a century or so. But the church that I view as my church has only been here since November 1981. Before that it had sat unused, not quite a mile farther east on the Lincoln River Road. Coincidentally, it too had been built in 1863.

Wood recalls that in the days after the church first burned, people who didn't know him well would ask him if he was going to leave. They would speculate aloud that this was the end of a church in Lincoln. "I didn't know what the future held," he recalls, "but I certainly wasn't going to leave."

That Easter the congregation worshipped in the town hall across the wide four-corner intersection in the middle of town, and through the windows could see the cinders and blackened rubble across the short stretch of asphalt. A week later when the worshipers gathered at the vacant Assembly of God church, one deacon used a motorcycle helmet for an offering plate and another used a glass punch bowl. And while there were certainly parishioners who cried that spring, Wood also felt a palpable energy.

Easter itself is like that. A day of despair and fallen hopes on a Friday some 2,000 years ago, when the man a small group of optimists believed was the Son of God was crucified and entombed, followed three days later by the power of a resurrection.

In addition to moving and repairing the church that has been in service ever since, the Lincoln congregation also launched the senior citizens housing project that helps anchor the village today. Everyone who was involved with the restoration of the church and the construction of the apartments for the elderly feels that the work helped to invigorate the congregation. Wood is still pastor of the Lincoln Church, and a study in good humor and quiet resolve -- a role model for me in many ways.

There are a variety of reasons why I'm a Christian and savor Easter Sunday, but sometimes it's a faith born in the ash. Among the few objects that survived the conflagration in 1981 and were pulled from the charred rubble? A weathervane that once more sits atop the church steeple. A pair of candlesticks that again are used on the church altar. And a brass cross. It had been bent double by the heat of the flames, but it survived.

And, today, it too is back on the altar.

Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Peace.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 16, 2006.)

The other day when I was checking in with the cluster flies in the attic -- just saying hello and spending some quality time with my family's 17 million little pets up there -- I came across a box with old record albums.

For those of you who are not quite sure what a record album is, just imagine taking all of the songs off a palm-sized iPod and putting them on flattened black Frisbees. Lots of flattened black Frisbees. Maybe even a flatbed worth of flattened black Frisbees. If you had 4,000 songs on your iPod, you would need about 400 record albums. And to put that in perspective, 400 record albums weigh -- and here I am guessing -- a few more pounds than Mount Mansfield. I actually did weigh that box I found in the attic. It had 51 albums wedged inside it, and came in at 32 pounds. You could put a lot of music on 32 pounds worth of iPods.

It has been more than a generation since most of us listened to record albums. Between the album and the iPod, there have been 8-track tapes, audio cassettes and compact discs. I certainly don't miss record albums. Good heavens, I was only dimly aware that we even had a box of them in the attic. I'm not even sure the cluster flies have been listening to them, and they don't have a whole lot of other entertainment options up there.

But as I pawed through the box, I felt a surge of sentimentality. Just as we often associate the dust jacket of a novel with a specific place in our lives when we first read it, those album covers instantly brought back me to very particular moments in my youth. Blondie's "Parallel Lines?" My first dates with the beautiful 18-year-old I would marry.

The best of Graham Parker and the Rumour? Finishing my undergraduate dissertation in college, and -- forgive me for admitting this in public -- playing a lot of sleep-deprived air guitar on a beaten-up couch in my dorm room.

Elton John's "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road?" Moving to Florida in middle school and meeting my new orthodontist (a sadist, it would turn out, if ever there was one).

Someone much wiser than I once observed that the music of our youth is the music we will listen to into old age. There might be something to that. The vast majority of what I listen to are the songs that meant something to me 20 and 25 years ago.

Now, I have an iPod. I appreciate its convenience and sound quality and the reality that it will probably increase the odds that I am deaf as a post by the time I am an old man, and will thus be able ignore everything anyone says to me. I also value my family's iPod stereo system that allows us to share the music on my daughter's or my iPod as if we were playing compact discs or (yes) record albums.

But we are losing something as we go digital, and this will soon affect books as it has already impacted music. When we download music (and, more and more, as we download books), we are less conscious of the artwork that envelops the package. Recall for a moment the latticework, the hands and the gulls with which the Who introduced us to "Tommy." Or the power and the poignancy of the small hungry child with the desperate eyes that marks the cover of George Harrison's "Concert for Bangladesh."

Disappearing as well is the physical connection to an object, the idea that you could touch the cover and read the liner notes and savor the artwork. Those albums we really cared for had totemic value. When my wife was in high school, another student stole a few dozen of her albums. Eventually they were returned, but to this day my wife remembers the sense of violation and outrage. Why? Because these were her record albums. Her music.

I certainly don't want to go back in history. But it seems a little ironic that these days it is only my cluster flies that spend any time with the objects and images that once meant so much to me.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 23, 2006.)