EAST MONTPELIER – Sometimes, when the stars align fortuitously, everything turns out fine: your car stops burning oil, your wife’s Raynaud’s quits bothering her, and your kid moves his drum set to the garage. Other times, when the alignment is bad, everything goes to smash. That was the case with[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – During the high summer the sun swings far enough north to flood the back porch with heat and light, especially in the afternoon at the hour for preprandials. But around Labor Day it retreats behind the northwest corner of the house, and it’s possible to sit out[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – It doesn’t seem possible it was that long ago, but it was. Seventy-four years now; my first autumn in New England. When you’re new to a place, you register everything completely, and with fresh eyes and ears. I had the incredibly good fortune to have been sent[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – Of all the cultural commentary that floods in here daily on the internet, this little story is one of my favorites. A man standing in a checkout line in a supermarket is talking in a foreign language with someone on his cell phone. The woman standing behind[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – Bridget, the young Irish woman who lives in my dashboard, led us unerringly across the glacier-striated grain of New England for almost five hours and popped us out onto Main Street in Rockland, Me., directly across from our favorite local seafood shack. Almost beside it, Front Street[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – “But ’tis strange; and oftentimes to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence.” The instruments of darkness, eh? It’s hard to believe in this scientific age, but lots of folks think them external (Satan, Beelzebub,[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – In the Adirondacks, the summer folks used to arrive by train, along with all their luggage for the summer. Their chauffeurs, who’d driven the family cars up from New York or New Haven, met them at the station to ferry them to their cottages (the men of[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – Syracuse, N.Y. in the mid-1950s; a steamy Friday mid-afternoon in July. I had just climbed up for a water break from the manhole I was digging beneath the pavement when a little brown man approached: brown suit, brown shirt and tie, tobacco-brown teeth and fingers. “Hey, Whitey!”[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – Reading and listening to the news as I do, and remembering my classes in American History (the best of which was taught by a delightful Englishman who still wore his Oxford varsity crew sweater), I can’t help but wonder if the United States is a nation of[Read More…]

EAST MONTPELIER – I once had a friend (now long gone to his reward) who seemed to take offense at the tag line I used in my radio commentaries. When I started out in radio, I was searching for a consistent way to end my weekly few minutes. “Why don’t[Read More…]

EAST HARDWICK – With only about 12 weeks left in the current presidential campaign, we’ve entered what I call the nyah-nyah phase: the fourth-grade-level taunting about personal characteristics, idiosyncrasies, and each candidate’s past missteps. Almost none of these attacks has any relevance to the great matters at hand, but they[Read More…]

EAST HARDWICK – During the epic Southwestern drought of the 1950s (my boss, a retired Presbyterian minister turned rancher, declared it Biblical), I spent a few months in the central Texas Permian Basin as a ranch hand. It was a whole new world to me. Everything, it seemed, had a[Read More…]