Monthly Archives: October 2008

Halloween is this coming Friday and I have one piece of advice for parents: Don’t take your kids trick-or-treating on Thursday. It sounds obvious, I know, but when my wife was 9 years old her father took her trick-or-treating the … Continue reading →

ANY DAY NOW, my cellphone is going to ring. This is news only because it will chirp in my home here in Lincoln, Vt., where until a short time ago there was absolutely no cellphone coverage. Recently, however, Unicel expanded … Continue reading →

So, we have now pushed the environment to the very edge of the cliff, the worldwide economy is about to go down for the third and final time, and the situation in Afghanistan is so bad that Iraq is starting … Continue reading →

EARLIER THIS YEAR my father turned 80, and as part of the surprise party I put together a DVD from old family slides. The Kodachrome images had been in my attic for 21 years, but it had been far longer … Continue reading →

I watched the presidential debate Tuesday night and I have to ask: Where did the Gallup folks find 80 undecided voters in Nashville? I didn’t know there were 80 left in the whole United States. The debate has been deconstructed and … Continue reading →

IT IS A GLORIOUS Saturday afternoon in Vermont, the sky the blue of Wedgwood china and the temperature in the high 60s. I have just sat down in the dry grass to watch a friend’s son play linebacker in a … Continue reading →

Supposedly, bad things come in threes. In the First World War, the myth goes, a soldier didn’t dare light three cigarettes on a match in the trenches at night, because that gave an enemy across no man’s land just enough … Continue reading →