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​“Who is that glamorous couple?” I asked Bill the Printer one long ago snowy day in Ohio. He’d just run off a stack of holiday cards featuring a gorgeously lit photo of a handsome couple in evening dress. “Are they actors? Millionaire philanthropists?” Bill laughed. “That’s what they want you to think. They’re Joan and…

​Many of my Spanish friends are firmly convinced of two things: 1) Thanksgiving is the most significant holiday in the US calendar, and 2) all American women spend their leisure hours sewing quilts. In vain have I protested that I’ve never quilted in my life. Equally impossible is convincing them that the prevalence of Thanksgiving…

I come from a family of light sleepers, and my ability to snooze for eight solid hours — a slippery goal at best — has not improved during the jittery pandemic months. Has anyone’s? Sleep experts talk of “a second pandemic of insomnia” and “coronasomnia.” But I’m resting a bit easier now that I’ve learned…

​Merriment Turns to Mayhem When Halloween Prank Goes Wrong! Every year we see headlines about practical jokes taken too far. Like the October 31st my friend returned from college to find the family home empty, furniture overturned, the kitchen splashed with what looked like blood. She freaked, fled, and called the cops, who tracked down…

​One long ago night, Rich burst through our front door shouting, “We have to get rid of the living room!” “Okay,” I said. “Should I get the sledgehammer?” “No, I mean reconfigure the space. I just heard a talk by Mike Vance, one of the creative geniuses who designed Disneyland. He says living rooms are…

​ ​Have you noticed anything weird lately? I mean besides the global pandemic and collapse of civilization as we know it? Apparently an increasing number of Americans are finding quarantine less isolating than expected, thanks to spectral roommates from the Great Beyond. Patrick Swayze may be dead, but he’s still fun to have around in…

What is it about weddings that encourages people to be so astonishingly indiscreet? I remember one best man starting his toast, “I’ve known the groom for twenty years. I’ve seen him through…” Long pause. “The dark times…” Naturally we all leaned forward, agog to learn about his misdeeds, but sadly there were few specifics. Another…

Forget the news, and the radio, and the blurred screen. This is the time of loaves and fishes. People are hungry and one good word is bread for a thousand. David Whyte Every day I wake up hoping for a miracle — a reliable vaccine, rain dousing the wildfires, a superhero arriving in the nick…

​For me, it will always be the fright night, the one where Rich and I scared the living daylights out of every child (and many adults) in our Ohio neighborhood. It was definitive proof that when you get into a vendetta with a six-year-old, chances are you’ll end up going way, way too far. It…

​In a year as awash with bad luck as 2020, it’s tempting to wonder whether the fault lies in our stars; after all, Mercury was in retrograde in early March, which could hardly be a coincidence. Or is it divine retribution — the Biblical End Times we’ve heard so much about? Could the madness be…