Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
It used to be that Los Angelenos were much too cool to express outright pride in their city, feeling that boosterism is for yahoos from the Midwest, but when I was there last week I got an earful about what a good place it is from friends who never said anything like that to me […]
Read MoreI bought a jar of elderberry jelly and an armload of rhubarb at a small-town festival last week, simply because the seller was a slender fair-haired luminous beauty who happened to be Amish, sitting, demure in a black bonnet, at a table beside her horse and buggy. She looked like an actress miscast for the […]
Read MoreMemorial Day is a lovely day in America, a day of reunion in small towns, where people drive up to the cemetery on Monday morning and file in, old-timers carrying lawn chairs, and even if you’ve missed a few years, people will come over and shake your hand and thank you for coming. You don’t […]
Read MoreI know nothing about what is going on in the country, I hear nothing, I have nothing to say, I am a writer locked up with a book that is due on Tuesday, so I am taking a break. No big deal. Everybody’s writing a book. In libraries and back rooms and parents’ basements, men […]
Read MoreGorgeous green spring came suddenly to Minnesota this year after weeks of tedious budding and blooming, a great burgeoning of foliage, and Bleak Street became the Via Paradiso, and we pale stoics took out pen and paper and wrote, “O love love love you are the best who ever was” or words to that effect, […]
Read MoreFlowering crabapples are in full purple bloom on both sides of our house. It feels as if we’re a ballroom and soon a crowd of teenagers in strapless gowns and white tuxes will come and stand around, as they do at proms, girls with girls and boys with boys, being elaborately cool and hoping somebody […]
Read MoreSaturday evening I sat on the porch of a little shotgun house on 7th Street in Columbus, Georgia, and breathed sweet and spicy air of magnolia and camellia and honeysuckle, the whole orchestra of Southern fragrance out and about, comforting the afflicted, and I thought of words I’d never ordinarily use, such as “suffused” and […]
Read MoreThe Republican candidates are slugging it out, talking tough about cracking down on gay Mexican wetback couples who are stealing our guns and leaving us defenseless against big government, decrying the evils of taxation, meanwhile an ancient Republican dropped by my house on Monday to sun himself on my porch and announce over coffee that […]
Read MoreOnce when I was teaching a composition class at the university, I flew back from New York for class and neglected to get back on Central Standard Time. I came bustling into the classroom and walked to the front, took off my coat, set my briefcase on the table, smiled at the students assembled, and […]
Read MoreWhen I was a kid looking up at a movie screen, I could read the text faster than it scrolled up from the bottom of the screen – “Once upon a time, in a land faraway, in a beautiful castle in the forest” — and I took this to mean that I was smart. It […]
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