Most of us have twenty digits, but the upper ten get nearly all the attention. Once we’ve outgrown the days of “this little piggy goes to market,” the lower ten are usually hidden in some protective footwear, and little account is taken of them – until something goes wrong. The classic case of something going […]
My home, since 1973, has been almost literally a stone’s throw from an area so celebrated for its beauty that calling it “picturesque” would be an understatement. In one sweeping panorama, you have the ocean, the mountains, a lovely rose garden, tall gracious trees, and a broad green sward leading up to the cloistered front […]
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In a popularity-survey of some of my recent “Thoughts and Ideas,” the winning line said, “One advantage of living alone is that you never have to be reasonable.” Although these words expressed my own feeling, I was surprised how many others also apparently feel the same way. I suppose it means that living with other […]
How do we determine the value of things? Is it only the question of what people will pay? Some American railroad tycoon of the “Robber Baron” era spoke in terms of exacting “all the traffic will bear” – meaning that he charged not what seemed fair or reasonable, but simply as much as he could […]
The worst ice cream I ever had was in England, when my family had recently returned there from the U.S., just after World War II. As a special treat, my sister and I were taken by relatives to some kind of ice cream parlor. Whatever we had there came with a tasteless wafer. It was […]
One of the most popular words in the lexicon of modern society is “care.” People in general don’t like to be handled roughly. Of course, there are exceptions, such as arranged fights, or episodes of sexual passion. But we are delicate creatures, in comparison with the hard surfaces of our natural and man-made environment. When […]
One of the advantages of outliving people you knew is that you can write freely about them. The worst best friend I ever had was named Nathan Povich Mensh. We were kids when we met in 1941 in Washington, D.C., where our houses backed onto each other, with an alley between. I was eight, and […]
“It takes a heap of living to make a house a home” is probably the best-remembered line of Edgar Guest – even though – as I’ve often found when my own work is (mis-) quoted – that isn’t exactly what he wrote. The public has an ability to improve upon things it likes, often by […]
Life is full of beginnings and endings – and sometimes they are so memorable that we tend to forget what comes in between. For example, I could not quote you any other words of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities – but I know it begins with “It was the best of times – It was […]
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Nature is so full of miracles that we tend to take some of them for granted, especially if they are there all the time – like our own bodies – or if they, at least, come and go with predictable regularity – like the sun and the moon. But there are others which tend to […]
Why is so much hair wanted where it isn’t, and not wanted where it is? Many of our ideas of beauty, of grooming – even of sexuality – are hair-related. It’s one of the things we have in common with our fellow mammals. (Many non-mammals – even some insects – may appear fuzzy – but, […]
No matter how much the world changes, buyers and sellers will always need each other. But what we have called “stores” were in a way like the dinosaurs – they got bigger and bigger until, so to speak, they ruled the earth, and then something happened, and now, in our own time, we see them […]
Until quite recently, when you wanted to destroy paper and make certain that nothing on it could ever again be read, the preferred method was to burn it. That is still your surest recourse – but burning is now generally in disfavor, because it means polluted air. So, a relatively new manner of destruction has […]
I may be the only kid on my block who can recite from memory the first words of the very first “Prince Valiant” comic. Actually, the term “comic” is totally inappropriate here, because “Prince Valiant” was very different from all the other features of that genre. For one thing, there were no balloons coming out […]
