Happy New Year. It’s begun with much snow and ice in New England, and as tough as than can be (especially when I’m walking Buddy the Schnauzer first thing in the morning) I’ve been struck by one of the true gifts of living in a climate like this: things change before your very eyes. The…

January approacheth, which means the plague of year-end best-of lists is upon us.Recently, I was asked to name four books to recommend as holiday gifts, and I had a hard time coming up with anything newish. The awful truth is, I read very few books last year. I have lots of excuses — mostly having…

When my daughter, Emilia, was in high school, there was a TV commercial on the air that portrayed a mother who transformed her kid’s room into a fancy-shmancy spa-bathroom within minutes of his departure for college. We used to tease each other about that ad. “That’s what we’re going to do,” I promised. “Don’t you…

Barack Obama and I go way back to May 2004, when he was running for the senate. I met him via a profile by William Finnegan in the pages of The New Yorker. Describing Obama in his Chicago neighborhood, Finnegan wrote, Every few minutes, our conversation was interrupted by passersby congratulating Obama on his primary…

September is a beauty in my neck of the woods, which makes it a bit harder to get back into harness and return to work. The kids who live on my block head to school wearing t-shirts and shorts, with the sweatshirts their mothers press on them wrapped around their waists. I head out to…

I’m at the beach for the week. Not working on the novel,which has consumed my consciousness pretty much non-stop all summer. So it’s not easy putting on the brakes. I’m on an “enforced” time-out (enforcers being my writing-group partners, Amy Hoffman and Steve McCauley, to whom I am eternally grateful for everything.)And I know I…

For me, the morning begins with the newspapers, which arrive somewhere in the vicinity of my front door, every single day of the week. This fact brands me as a bit of an anachronism, and certainly a demographic cliché: middle-aged, middle-class, blahblahblah. According to a 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People…

YEARS AGO, I made myself some of those print-your-own business cards. They were kind of flimsy and perforated around the edges, but I didn’t want to spend real money because I was so rarely asked for a card. Those homemade nameplates languished in my wallet until eventually they were too faded and grubby to hand…

This is an experiment in internetworking. I would like to enlist your help, suggestions, ideas for a project dear to my heart. Bert Seager and I have written REQUITED, a CD of songs, which is now available for you to hear and/or purchase. (Check the link in a previous posting or at my website homepage,…