We were screwing around in the South China Sea when the word came, or maybe we were conducting voyage repairs at the sprawling naval complex at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Don’t get me started on the Philippines. It was a sad wonderland, and it always makes me think of pleasure and loss, almost simultaneously. […]

The Ice Age may be over today, or at least on its way to history. Warm air will arrive from the Gulf and will give us the warmest day in the last two-dozen. It will turn the hardedges of the mounds over the curbs to salty soup that will coat everything moving in gritty white. […]

L-L-I The sun had just set somewhere in the grayness to the west, but the dregs of the light still reflected off the sheets of ice on the yards and rooftops of Arlington Forest. I was pretty well set for dinner, which is more of an effort than I would normally make. My older son […]

Dog Years The Dog started to talk to me around five. I am not ready. It ia barely Saturday, and I am still exhausted, or perhaps better said, pre-tired. His low pre-bark carries a supplication and an implied threat, and that is how we presently found ourselves skating over the frozen crust over the earth […]

The ice mist has passed over the white marble buildings on the Mall, and the skies are blue above the hard frozen landscape. I panicked briefly when I looked at the calendar this morning. There is a morning activity listed, made with the optimism that the storm would have come and gone Monday, and the […]

Ice Age There was a hiss in the air that sounded like bacon frying. It was dark at the usual time, and I went straight from the soft nether land of bed to the coffee percolator and out to the balcony to listen. The sleet was coming down with a palpable hiss on the ice-sheet […]

Appointment in Samarra Somerset Maugham told the old tale again in 1933, just as the world was sliding into another really large misunderstanding, which still could have been avoided. John O’Hara used the story, too, placing the Iraqi town later, in Pennsylvania. But I like Maugham’s version, which went like this, Death speaking the monologue: […]

The Y Chromosome It was not a good weekend, and there is snow on the way. A tractor-trailer overturned on the Beltway Saturday morning, and 165,000 eggs were broken, leaving a yellow river of yolk around the Capital. Yesterday, on the anniversary of the bombing of a major Shia shrine, and the advent of the […]

I am not exactly between worlds this morning. I know exactly where I am, though I wish I were elsewhere. There is a work project spread across one of the mute computers. Comments are due this morning, and I have some vitriol to burn off before attempting it. There is the matter of what was […]

Main Navy and Munitions Last night was an affair at Big Pink. The Admiral was coming to dinner. He is the senior flag officer of my acquaintance, the Last Man Standing from his generation. I bustled around in the afternoon in preparation. I had matching plates set out, and the silver setting that I bartered […]