Columnists

Thoughts on a 13-year-old mouth liberated from braces.

The older I get, the less happy I am about the dark afternoons. Sunset brings us down. We have to fight, fight against the dying of the light.

When the Cuban missile crisis had everyone on tenterhooks, I, a collegian then, was pretty much oblivious.

Every morning is a double espresso kind of morning around this ranch — the Double-Bar-E Crazy Ranch on Edwards Lane.

There were 18 here the other night, and now, as is the case most of the year, just the two of us and O’en.

Eighty years ago this month, the mayor of the Village of East Hampton issued an urgent plea: An important piece of early American history was in danger of being lost.

Funny that it took my daughter heading up and over to college in western New York for me to at last appreciate the state I grew up in.

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.