EAST MONTPELIER – In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, the schoolmarmish features of the newsies were on full display. Like old-fashioned country preachers predicting the apocalypse, they warned of unprecedented numbers of holiday travelers. It is, after all, the weekend of our greatest domestic migration, clogging the highways and[Read More…]
A Yankee Notebook
When the wheels fall off
EAST MONTPELIER – On an early spring day in 1958 I was tooling north in Constance Green, my trusty old Plymouth, on Route 9N in New York State, with Lake Champlain off to my right. The frost heaves were fierce, but in those days I treated them more like ski[Read More…]
Why they always hang up
EAST MONTPELIER – I haven’t conducted anything like a scientific survey of the subject, but I think I’d be willing to bet even money that each time I randomly turn on the little television set in my kitchen, tuned to MSNBC (now MS NOW) or CNN), I’m more likely to[Read More…]
I travel in silence
EAST MONTPELIER – Another interesting weekend in Massachusetts. This time it included the wedding of the son of a pair of old friends of Bea’s in Cambridge. Accustomed as I am to the haute couture of Vermont, my Sunday-go-to-meetin’ duds are a pair of chino work pants that look pretty[Read More…]
Even here in Vermont
EAST MONTPELIER – A few months ago I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker. In it, a king stands on his raised veranda with an aide, looking down on an obviously angry crowd armed with pitchforks and torches. Nonplussed, he turns to his courtier, who advises something like this:[Read More…]
People who made it possible
EAST MONTPELIER – “Mister Lange,” Judge Murphy intoned. “In the State of New York you are allowed to amass eight points in fourteen months on your driver’s license before a review of its status must be held. You have managed to amass fourteen points in eight months. Now, what do[Read More…]
Hope and wishful thinking
EAST MONTPELIER – I’m not much of a hand for praying anymore. More and more over the years it has come to seem too much like an implicit abdication of responsibility for desired outcomes. Still, thanks to many decades of indoctrination, I do occasionally slip into prayer-ful attitudes toward coming events. They[Read More…]
Pooh-poohing the winter’s inconveniences
EAST MONTPELIER – Well, it’s happened. We could feel it coming on for a few weeks: long shadows across the forest paths by four o’clock, nippy air flooding in through the door when I let Kiki out early, fog in the river valleys, the night light in the hall turning[Read More…]
So far, very little
Well, now, that was a weekend! Late on Monday afternoon, I’m still trying to collate all the details and events of the last three days and turn from them to face the coming week with some new ideas and insights. So far, very little. My friend Bea had scored a pair of[Read More…]
But suddenly, with overnight company in the offing
EAST MONTPELIER – It’s been a pretty peaceful and pleasant autumn here. The drought has been bedeviling farmers and orchardists, but it’s been perfect weather for my little convertible. The legislature and governor, though occasionally having differences of opinion, have at least not been calling each other names. The news[Read More…]
Probably think I’m losing it upstairs
EAST MONTPELIER – The back lot outside my office window is waist-high in a sea of goldenrod with little sprigs of purple asters peeping out here and there, a last feast for the bumbling bumblebees. Little flocklets of tiny birds, warblers, I’m guessing; they flit too fast for me, flow[Read More…]
There’s no crying need for anything additional from me
EAST MONTPELIER – Saturday morning, in bright sunshine and warming temperatures, a young man sat on the concrete railing of the Rialto bridge in downtown Montpelier. He bore two signs, one in each hand. I confess I can’t remember one of them, I think it had something to do with[Read More…]
