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
You wake up on a summer morning, the smell of possibility in the air, and you feel slim and gifted and innocent, and of course you should mow the lawn, but as Walt Whitman said, “What is the grass? It is the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift.” And who would cut God’s hanky? […]
Read MoreTwenty-four people packed into the dining room for my 64th birthday dinner and made a steady dull roar from the salad course right on through the cake and coffee, and I hardly got a word in edgewise. People kept inquiring if I was having fun, which is irritating. The answer is no. I don’t want […]
Read MoreIt is stifling hot in Minnesota, more like Savannah than St. Paul, and if the heat wave goes on much longer, I am bound to start writing a play in which folks sit around in their underwear beneath a ceiling fan and drink sloe gin and curse the degeneracy of their ancestors that cost them […]
Read MoreI had meant to take up the Middle East today, but my analytical powers have wilted in the heat, and it is all I can do to get the recycling out to the curb and take the car in for an oil change. And now I’m all caught up in the question of what color […]
Read MoreGLACIER BAY, Alaska – I am aboard a cruise ship gliding slowly between snow-capped mountains that remind me of the art my parents hung on our living room wall back in Minnesota in the Fifties. It was a large translucent picture of snow-capped mountains, lit by an electric bulb behind it, and when guests came […]
Read MoreA summer night in paradise, supper in the back yard, and the neighbors’ elderly cat who is on his last legs wanders over, smelling the salmon on our grill, walking as if his feet hurt. He’s got the old cat blues. He wakes up in the morning and everything tastes like turpentine, he feels like […]
Read MoreIf a preacher secretly accepts a bucket of money from a saloonkeeper to organize a temperance rally at a rival saloon and maybe send in a gang of church ladies to chop up the bar with their little hatchets, this would strike you and me as sleazy, but others are willing to make allowances, and […]
Read MoreMy sandy-haired, gap-toothed daughter has written “I love Daddy” in green chalk on the driveway, and of course it’s gratifying to get this endorsement, but a father is never sure if he’s doing the right thing or not. I am an indulgent parent who wants to make her happy, but instead of taking her to […]
Read MoreWhite custardy clouds in the blueberry sky and here I am, sprawled on a chaise on the porch, ambition leaking out of me like water through cupped hands. Ambition has left the building. Hello, summer. The country is in danger but someone else can rally to defend it, not me. Flag-burning gay married men are […]
Read MoreTimes have changed, and I know this because I have children, two of them, one born in the old days and one in modern times. One was born back before seat belts, when a child might ride standing up in the front seat next to Daddy as he drove 75 mph across North Dakota, and […]
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