Blog

This is mostly about my knees. They creak now. Stiffen up. When I get up in the morning, I feel like the Tin Man—just a few squirts of WD-40 would really do the trick. I’ve [...]

Well, it’s winter already, isn’t it? That wasn’t much of a fall, as lovely as it was. So I’m doing what I usually do, which is to mentally hunker down, keeping busy, trying not to [...]

Whenever I would read about someone publishing a book for the first time, the narrative went something like this: “I worked for years on the book, but once I got an agent, it was just [...]

After living in the mountains (where there is no such thing as “yard work”) for years, and then in a 600-square-foot condo (where our HOA fees paid for the tiny-yard work and shoveling), Cynthia and [...]

Remarkably, I have only ten pet peeves, which is about 28 fewer than the average middle-aged American’s and 143 fewer than the average German’s. Here they are, ordered according to the extent to which they [...]

Right now, my son is outside, forging a flagstone walkway from our driveway to our front stoop. It’s 8:45 on a Tuesday morning in late April. He is a ski instructor, but the resort where [...]

Admit it: I say “teenagers,” and a part of you recoils in horror. They smell weird. They have zits. They have epic mood swings based on incidental events—an exchanged glance in the high-school hallway, a [...]

It’s not as if I were an immigrant and a part of me was Mexican or French or Ghanaian while the other part of me was American and culturally my ancestral homeland and my adopted [...]