At breakfast we met the terrazzo’s resident beggar-pigeon, a bird who has claimed the terrace as his turf and defends it vigorously from rivals pecking around for bits of bread tossed by the diners, despite the fact that instead of a tail he has only a gray stump. Angelo and the rest of the staff
Frae goblins and ghosties And lang-leggity beasties And things that gae bump in the night, Guid Laird deliver us! – Scottish bedtime prayer
Beauties and the Beast Brett Kavanaugh’s a Justice now. Repulsivans have made it big. They turned deaf ears to all the row, And slapped some lipstick on a pig.
There was once a traveling peddler who got lost in a vast forest on his way to a market town. He ran out of food, and was faint with hunger and thirst when he finally spotted a little cottage nestled in an open glade. It had a steeply-pitched roof, a single chimney at one end
A Hobbling Tour of Florence and Rome Observations of an Unapologetic Tourist Part Two We arrived at Florence’s Santa Maria Novella station and got a quick ride to our hotel with a sharp young cabbie who was surprised to find two obvious Americans who sure didn’t look as if their grandparents came from Italy, speaking
Dog Stories I grew up with dogs, and I’m afraid of them. Our good friends in New Hampshire have two black Labrador-Chow mixes, friendly, affectionate critters now going a bit gray in the muzzle and lame in the hips. But they are still dogs, and they regard it as their bounden duty to guard the
A HOBBLING TOUR OF FLORENCE AND ROME Observations of an Unapologetic Tourist Part One FLORENCE In June of 2006 my wife Patsy and I went to Italy, partly on business, partly as tourists, but also to practice the Italian we’d been studying for more than five years. Although we have no Italian heritage and haven’t
(NOTE: I wrote this piece for Terry Ross’s Black Lamb in 2008) I graduated from Yale University in 1964, and in an election year in which both candidates are Yalies who were members of Skull and Bones, some of my friends who think of Yale as a training-ground for Elite Eastern Snobs (which it certainly
Hurricane Carol hit Cape Cod at the end of August, 1954, when I was eleven. It was a bad storm, but our family’s big shingle-style house in Quissett had been built in the 1880s by my great-grandfather, using local carpenters who doubled as boatwrights and took bad weather as the norm. And unlike the last
True Colors We white folks aren’t white. We’re pink, shading into beet red when we’re angry or drunk or both, tan when we’ve spent some time in the sun, gray when we’re dying, and olive drab when we’ve been dead for awhile. Only Vladimir Putin is really white, but he’s a vampire, not a human