The morning ritual had been the same for years: up at 7 and then walk the dog. Put on the coffee and while it’s brewing, finish the remainder of my morning thousand steps, do my stretches, pour the coffee and add the cream, hack off a square of extra-dark chocolate and head upstairs to my ...
Traffic was slow because of the rain, and I was going to be late. Between that moment so drenched in anxiety and the final resolution, I was saved by kindness. Last week I drove to Pittsburgh to get the third and final shot in my knee. Traffic is always bad in the morning and worse when ...
Remember compact discs? I have dozens of them around the house, all of them just loitering in boxes for lack of any gadgets on which to even play them anymore. When I see them I don’t see wasted music. I see frustration. Every one of those discs required lock-pick precision and ...
To roast a marshmallow, you stuff the pointed stick through the center, plunge it into the campfire and hold it there until it catches fire. And then you hold the stick aloft until the marshmallow is fully engulfed and scorched to black. Everybody knows this. Or so I thought until the ...
This weekend will mark one year since I retired. In my case, retired is a euphemism for what happened that day. I think of retiring as a sort of “reclining” after years of hard work — a reward. I know a few people who have the retirement date circled in red on their calendar, with X’s ...
Let’s see. There was the Summer of Love in 1967, then the Summer of Soul two years later, and then in 1977, the crime-soaked Summer of Sam. And most of us are still creeped out by the Summer of Lantern Flies. And here we are in 2026, which is shaping up to be the Summer of Explosive ...
