In November 1993, not quite a week before my wife’s and my daughter was born, my wife made a sacrifice of epic proportions: she went with me to see the four-hour movie, “Gettysburg,” on a Friday night date. Our baby was going to arrive any day now, and this might be our last chance for […]
Category Archives: General
22
Mar
Mar
Not long ago, a reader stopped me on Church Street in Burlington, Vermont and asked, “Do your cats still play turd hockey?” I admitted that our five are a little older now, and have accepted the realities of age. “Now it’s more like shuffleboard,” I told her. And then she asked me about Funny Face. […]
25
Jan
Jan
Today is my father’s birthday, but he died in 2011 so it’s really just another day. He would have been 87. But I thought I should give him a shout-out in this space, given the incredible amount of material he provided – never by design – for this column. Certainly my world was diminished when […]
18
Jan
Jan
It was twenty years ago that I interviewed Cornel West for a lengthy magazine article. He was only 42 then, but he was already an intellectual rock star and the bestselling author of “Race Matters.” Harvard had just lured him away from Princeton. He’s now a professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological […]
11
Jan
Jan
It’s the week before Christmas and I am in Moscow – the one famous for the Kremlin in Russia, not the one famous for speeding tickets in Vermont. (Okay, that’s not fair. Moscow, Vermont is known for more than just speeding tickets. It’s also known for speeding warnings.) It’s a Sunday afternoon and I am […]
28
Dec
Dec
This coming Wednesday night, once again – as I do every year – I will be contemplating the irony and wistfulness in the penultimate sentence in “The Great Gatsby:” “Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .And one fine morning – ” Fitzgerald was on to something when he combined […]
21
Dec
Dec
The bug wasn’t Gregor Samsor-big. We’re not talking Kafkaesque. But in my memory it was the size of a cat. It was vaguely wasp-like – black and yellow – with both a stinger at the rear and an earwig’s pincers emanating from the sides of its jaw. If you packed its bulbous abdomen with D […]
14
Dec
Dec
This coming Thursday evening around 5:30, you’ll see a small crowd assembled on the exterior steps of Burlington, Vermont’s City Hall, looking out upon Church Street. Sometimes there are 30 people and sometimes there are 50. It might be snowing, but they’ll still be there. They’ll be holding candles and doing something poignant and powerful […]
23
Nov
Nov
Over the years, I have never been shy in this space when it comes to maligning my late mother’s contribution to the family Thanksgiving: a broccoli mold. Imagine a Bundt cake that looked and smelled like dog vomit. It was inedible, and yet many of us ate it because we loved my mother. (Apparently, not […]
10
Nov
Nov
The Second World War ended an astonishing 69 years ago. The armistice for the Korean War was signed 61 years ago. We left Vietnam 41 years ago. These dates are rather like ancient history to many Americans, as distant as the Peloponnesian War. And our more recent history? Desert Shield began in 1990, Desert Storm […]
