Bad Jokes Spring has sprung, The grass has riz! I wonder where The birdies iz. -Anon. Well, the birdies are finally here, I’m happy to say, building nests, swearing at each another at the top of their voices, and crapping on our New Hampshire cabin’s back deck, bless their messy little hearts. In honor
Predators As I write (April. 2017), a sexual molester is still squatting in the White House, although these days his hold on the presidency is getting as shaky as his grasp of reality in general. As far as I know, the Orange Oligarch with a penchant for grabbing women’s private parts with his pudgy
SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT When I was twelve years old, my brother Mike and I were handed off to our paternal grandparents so that our mother and father could claw their way through a divorce without having to fret about bruising our tender sensibilities. For the most part, said sensibilities went unscathed at our grandparents’ elegant
Recently I watched Jackie, the movie about John F. Kennedy’s First Lady on the day of the assassination and those that immediately followed. Natalie Portman was superb in the title role. She caught Jackie’s breathy voice and upper-class WASP accent perfectly, but, more important, she captured the new widow’s fear and rage. It was a
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