May 16-20, 2016 In the hierarchy of correspondence forms, nothing beats a physical letter, writes Christie, particularly for their superior ability to be stumbled upon. Cassie threw up her hands in despair about climate change – and her intractable fatalism about it – and LWON’s trusty commenters took the ball and ran with it. Wherever […]
Month: May 2016
I originally wrote about getting pooped on by birds on October 23, 2014. Recent events call for an update. 1. Washington, D.C., 2004 or so A bench around a circular planter, with a tree in it. I was eating my lunch. I felt something on my arm. We call it poop, but the stuff that […]
My first sighting of one of life’s everyday astonishments was as a little fellow in the 1960s, sitting unbuckled in the back seat of my family’s ’57 Chevy. Whenever we hit the highway on our way to the Jersey shore or the Lower East Side of Manhattan where my grandparents lived, we would approach and […]
The Florida panhandle got some big press this week, yet another early human find confirmed in North America, people entrenched along the Aucilla River south of Tallahassee 14,550 years ago. This came from an underwater excavation where archaeologists have been plumbing a sinkhole through which the river flows. Artifacts and megafauna remains have gathered in the […]
Somewhere there is an old recording of me. I can’t find the tape, but I’ll tell you what I remember. I’m young — maybe sixth grade — and inexplicably wearing a burgundy blazer. My school is holding some sort of an event for Earth Day. The local TV reporter asks me why I’m participating. “I think […]
This post first ran on September 26, 2012.My mother sent me an old letter recently. It was a handwritten note scrawled across two pages that she’d written to her sister more than 30 years ago. My family had just moved to West Germany, where my dad was stationed in the Air Force, and in the […]
May 9-13 This week, Richard set out to prove, unscientifically, that slow readers are slow language learners. When he failed, he realized his method was scientific after all — just not in the way he expected. Jennifer discovered she was just fine with being woken up in the wee hours by hysterical laughter, so long […]
(Pip too big for jar) One year ago I rescued a one-eyed tiny frog, a spring peeper, from my pool. Since then I have gone to lengths to not only keep it alive, but also to try and make it happy, as if that is something that is doable, rational, or admirable. I have long […]
