Columnists

Other than everyone in masks on the plane, there was nothing much out of the ordinary about Alaska Air Flight 458. It seemed strange to travel again, being the first time that I had been aboard an aircraft since 2019. For the most part, passengers followed the rules, but there were a few people in the section around seat 18D who needed repeated reminders from the flight attendants to “Cover your nose.”

Hard-hitting college football action — a cure for the late-night-Wednesday-in-November blues.

I’m not supposed to say this — visualize me right now muttering “Knock on wood” as I rap smartly on the top of my head — but I am the lucky dame who always wins the raffle: I win things much more frequently than chance says I ought to. If there is a door prize or basket of cheer, I expect to soon be carrying the basket home, strapped with a seatbelt into the front passenger seat beside me, softly chuckling to myself like a thief.

The desert is hardly deserted, at least the one that is rimmed by the San Jacinto mountains in Southern California, where two of our grandchildren, unbridledly joyous 4 and 6-year-old girls, live. Untrammeled joy, however, was not our lot last week inasmuch as an 11-year-old grandson who lives in northwestern Ohio underwent at the same time a severe Covid-caused trial ultimately overcome only by astute medical intervention and his characteristic bravery.

When I was a teenager, the doomed trajectory of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life story caught my attention.

My granddaughter stroked the ball well in a middle school tennis match at Sportime the other day, but it was her composure that struck me.

My teen years here in the 1970s, in retrospect, seems a halcyon time.

Adventures in a deserted Kmart.

Doing the storms, the worst rot I found was on windows less than 20 years old made of junk wood and not intended to last.

There’s more going on than you’d think at Sunken Meadow come state qualifier time.

In the mid-1970s, Promised Land was like the wilderness of the Bible.

I quit Facebook years ago, convinced that, despite the happy patina, it was by and large a medium for meanness, for back-stabbing, name-calling, ganging-up, and worse.