. I found an interesting estate sale in Amherst last week. I got a nice set of vintage luggage from the 1940s maybe, three suitcases that fit inside one another. It was in the original box, so I figure the decedent whose estate it was was a collector. If you’re […]
Tonight I took the bull by the horns and finished my Houston story. It took seven hours of intense grappling, but it’s done. I have a deal with GoNOMAD that when I’m fussing over my stories, I do it off the clock, as one of our writers would do. I […]
When you first wrote, “Jimmy and me went to school,” the teacher said it should be “Jimmy and I went to school.” Okay. So far so good. Then you wrote, “The teacher erudicated Jimmy and I.” Nope. It should be, “Jimmy and me.” The way to figure it out is […]
Some scholars believe the sole purpose of the predicate nominative is to confuse and confound students of grammar. It’s a holdover from Latin, and I think it’s on its way out. The verb ‘to be’ – like other linking verbs – does not take an object, so the pronoun following […]
When I was a kid I got an American Revolution chess set for my birthday, which I left at my parents for rainy summer vacation days, but it sat there unopened in the game cupboard for thirty years. Since we just found nursing home placements for our parents, my brothers […]
When I worked in newspapers I covered a lot of town governments around New England. One of my first beats was a bunch of towns in New Hampshire and Vermont where I would keep track of the selectmen and the school board and the sewer district and everything else. Lots […]
We just had a referendum in our town about whether we wanted good schools, whether we wanted to pay our teachers a living wage, whether we wanted curbside trach pick-up. Of course the vote was a resounding No. We saw all these hand-painted signs up in town, “Vote Yes” two […]
As much as any other arugula-chomping, NPR-listening, left-leaning liberal, I’m savoring the sexual indiscretions of the right-wing bible-thumpers, but I think it’s important to savor only the hypocrisy of it all. That is, here’s a guy who said someone else should resign because they had an affair, but he had […]
I went up to the Deerfield Academy tag sale a couple of weeks ago to get me some preppie shoes, and sure enough I found a pair of really cool loafers that someone wore in the snow and they got wet and there was road salt all over them. So […]
Back in 2004 I was in the market for a used car, so I went out shopping. I know nothing about cars, and I was talking about how hard it was with my buddies at Yankee Candle. And they were guys who knew all about cars and they said it […]