by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – I gave Kiki her Kong with a healthy dab of peanut butter inside, promised her I’d be back as soon as possible (the next day; my daughter Martha would pick her up in a couple of hours), tossed my gym bag and rain parka[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – It’s an old New England tradition, when you’ve been invited to visit someone, to adjure them not to fuss. I’ve just spent the weekend at a class reunion at my old school, and I can tell you: They fussed! It’s hard to imagine how[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – This will be the week of my 70th high school reunion, a joyous occasion, though diminished a great deal by the absence of deceased classmates and others who for one reason or another won’t make it. Increasingly, as Time’s wingéd chariot draws near, reunions[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – On paper, the Connecticut River and the Rhone don’t look all that different. Each of them is about three hundred miles long from the town nearest its source (Pittsburg and Chamonix) to its debouchement into the sea (Long Island Sound and the Mediterranean). Their[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – It was always a pleasure, at the beginning formation of Boy Scout meetings, to respond to the command, “Report!” with “All present or accounted for, sir.” Now, over 75 years later, it’s still very satisfactory to count noses in the airline gate area at[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – By the time you read this, I’ll be home from what I hope will have been an idyllic 10 days traveling with friends of New Hampshire Public Broadcasting down the Rhone Valley from Chamonix to Arles. I’m writing it during a serious welter of[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – I spent a couple of weeks in Costa Rica a few years ago. Lovely place. But by the time we were due to return home, I found I could hardly wait to get there. The weather had been lovely, and the bird-watching spectacular. Each[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – It’s often characterized as a British officers’ drinking song, but it’s hardly that. “The Anacreontic Song” was the official song of an 18th-century club of London “wealthy men of social rank” that met monthly for banquets, musical performances, and group singing. Their patron saint,[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – The other day – a bluebird day if ever there was one: temperature in the seventies; bright blue sky, robins on the lawn, coltsfoot rioting along the driveway – I shuffled tentatively across the newly mud-free yard to the barnlike garage where the cars[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – If there were a Shakespearean stage direction for the arch-conservative wing of American politics as it is currently constituted, it would be, “Exeunt stage right, scattering petards.” How in the world any group can expect to prevail consistently among the majority of the electorate[Read More…]

by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – American Airlines Flight #6059 to Burlington swung wide over Lake Champlain and approached the airport from the north, delightfully early, explaining without words why we were early: a strong south wind all the way from Philadelphia. A wheelchair was waiting for me halfway up[Read More…]