Columnists

You have to wonder how friendships will survive the pandemic.

My own favorite moment of 2020 was circling deck seven aboard the Queen Mary II in high seas, tilting into the high winds, as we crossed the North Atlantic back in January.

Every American should have the experience of complete, untethered freedom, if only for a while.

My mom’s ability to reach out, give you the spotlight, kill at cocktail hour, and, by God, hold up a conversation, is a source of endless luxury for my dad, sister, and me.

There have been a lot of strange nights around the Fourth of July at our place. This year might turn out to be one of the strangest.

On this, the first day of summer, I thought it would be fit to fetch the snow shovel from its place beside the front door and take it to the shed out back. “I guess we won’t be needing this for a while,” I said to Mary, before recalling that given the winter that wasn’t, we hadn’t needed it at all.

Let's pause a moment to reflect on the passing of Joe Sinnott, artist and inker instrumental in shaping the look of the Marvel Comics universe in its 1960s heyday.

Dinnertime for black-backed gulls more or less coincides with people dinner around here, or so it seems to me. 

When Mary said we were already in heaven, our backyard providing ample evidence that it exists, I said Emily Dickinson had said something similar in some of her poems.

A self-imposed race against the clock to give blood as the pandemic drags on.

Exactly six years, eight months, and one day have elapsed since the last time I played the cello.

As such things go, early on during the pandemic I passed on a piece of good advice I had heard — about learning a new skill during the lockdown — then did not really heed that thought myself.