The Place to Take a Humor Break
SOMERVILLE, Mass. Maggie Turbek gave up on her hope of writing full-time long ago, but that hasn’t stopped her from crushing the dreams of others. “I like to tell my young clients that they have […]
The wife is out of town this weekend, an opportunity for me to catch up with an old friend whose idea of a good time is, to put it mildly, not shared by the distaff […]
The kids are getting older–they’re in high school now–and with summer jobs and college campus visits, every year it’s harder to squeeze in the special family time of aggravation and bickering we used to experience […]
CONCORD, Mass. This quiet town in the western suburbs of Boston was ground zero for the Transcendentalist Movement, a 19th century philosophical reaction to the prevailing intellectual and religious dogmas of the time, and traces […]
WASHINGTON. Unemployed penmanship instructors marched on Congress yesterday, the last Monday before most elementary school students return to school, demanding that the federal government commit $40 billion to improve America’s handwriting in order to avert a […]
It’s the final weeks of August, time for me to check on the kids to see how they’re doing with their summer reading lists. Things haven’t changed much in our little town since I was […]
Call me crazy, but I like to write poetry. For cats. Cats are a good training ground for poets. They are largely indifferent to poetry, like the overwhelming majority of people, but that still makes […]
At a college graduation a few years back it hit me: my two sons had grown to manhood without ever playing an inning of unsupervised baseball–that is, without uniforms, screaming parents, and designer bottled water in the dugout […]
The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles issued driver’s licenses to 1,905 dead people. The Boston Globe It was one of those miscues that causes you, in retrospect, to slam your palm to your forehead and […]
It always returns at the end of summer–the feeling of failure. It has a dry, bitter taste that goes with it, as if it’s a wasting disease that afflicts your entire body and psyche and […]