Columnists

A storm’s merely glancing blow leaves a parent free to focus on a daughter’s wrenching departure for college.

Perhaps the calamitous end to the endless war in Afghanistan will finally persuade us that a liberal democracy cannot be grafted through force of arms onto other societies.

I had been upstairs in the main newsroom working with our August interns when we heard several loud thumps above the usual background noise from outside.

I’m writing this in a blaze of blinding sun and white concrete, poolside at the Lighthouse Inn on Cape Cod, whither the kids and I have hied ourselves for a last-minute, three-night mini-cation. The Lighthouse Inn is a family-run resort founded in 1938, a cottage colony by the sea. A band was playing “Build Me Up, Buttercup” and “Sweet Caroline” by the water’s edge as we checked in.

Mets games over the AM radio only make a trip to Citi Field itself that much sweeter. As long as the rain holds off . . .

Mary said she was excited to hear that I was making Lidia’s roasted eggplant with ziti and ricotta tonight, testimony, I suppose, to the depths of ennui we’ve plumbed — plum tomatoes are in the recipe too — since Emily and the kids left for Ohio, leaving us to marvel on our own at the glowing light she sees caressing us here.

Signs of the coming change of season come too soon for my taste.

Either you love carnivals and fairs or you loathe them.

A veritable tsunami of coffee in a decades-old thriller sets a grateful reader to thinking.

I was thinking the other day, walking in our neighborhood, that we were blessed by God; later, our daughter Emily, who lives in Ohio, told us why.

I have been spending a lot of time aboard Cerberus this summer, though not as much of it sailing as I would have liked.

Among the brilliant things I never did was an art project I conceived of in my late teens, in which I was going to take Polaroid photographs of my feet clad in favorite pairs of shoes. An autobiography in footwear.