Humpty Drumpfty Perhaps it was bound to happen sooner or later, but so-called reality TV has finally become so-called real life: a professional con-man is the president-elect of the Untidy States of America. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” have rared back and kicked her onto history’s dust-heap, and there is wailing and gnashing of
Our cat Xoco arches his back into a bow, fluffs out his tail, and yowls. He holds the pose for a moment, relaxes, and pads off to the kitchen to see whether I’ve dished out supper for him and his brother Quetzal. I’m glad I have: even the cutest kittycat can be a little scary
I live in New York, which may not be the loudest city in the world (word has it that Delhi, Beijing, and Ciudad de Mexico are even more cacophonous), but certainly must rank among the top ten. My wife and I live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in a back apartment above a courtyard; ours
hauntings Some years ago my wife Patsy and I had Thanksgiving dinner at the Maplehurst Inn, one of the oldest and grandest buildings in Antrim, New Hampshire. It’s always been a traveler’s rest of one kind or another: the original structure, still the core of the Inn, was a tavern put up before the
The Republican Presidential candidate is of German extraction, and his family surname was originally Drumpf. It’s a perfectly normal moniker auf Deutsch, but in English it sounds a bit like someone hawking up a loogie. So like many immigrants before them, when they arrived in America they changed it to Trump, in order to
GUNS The motto of New Hampshire, where I spend some of my time, is “Live Free Or Die,” and a significant number of its residents are rabid anti-Federalists, hence ferocious upholders of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. They tend to forget that the Amendment, drafted by the Founders not long after
Ever since I first learned how to string words together, I’ve enjoyed writing letters to my friends and family. When I was eleven, I was sent to camp in the North Woods of Maine, not so much for my pleasure, but because my mother and father were slashing their way through a vicious divorce that