Last Call The fog is thick this morning, and the cherry blossoms are on the trees, and there is a crappy newspaper at my hotel door. USA Today, I think, the one with the bright colors written for high school kids, if they could read. There were days I would have killed for a newspaper, […]

I’ll confess I am at sea this morning. Up too early, too much to think about. The Times did not help; the issues lack focus this morning. The perils are all out there, lurking in all the articles, and maybe some promise. The approach of Spring is viewed by the correspondent who writes from the […]

Potomac Potemkin You know what I want to write about this morning, and I can’t. I had instructions from the Chairman not to say anything more than “negotiations are continuing at a high level,” and later in the day, a terse note from the business unit instructing me to maintain my “laser focus” on the […]

I was standing in the corner of the main room that contains the dining table. My jaw hurt from the Persian dentist’s adventures in the back of my mouth. In front of me, a muted Duke basketball team was going down to defeat to the Louisiana State Tigers. Dinner was burning, I could smell it, […]

Pay for Performance Money makes the world go around. It was true in Cabaret and it is true in Washington. Money is the most interesting change I’ve ever seen, going from bureaucrat to capitalist. Of course there is more of it, which is quite a novelty. But what’s more, out here the amount you make […]

Brackets There is a basketball festival going on. You must have heard about it somewhere along the line, even if you are not a fan. Everyone across the land filled out the ladder chart of the brackets, hoping for a big payoff in the office pool. The NCAA tournament is scheduled at just the right […]

First Contact Three years and ten hours ago I still worked for Uncle Sam. I heard the news just before bedtime, and I called the Boys and told them it had begun. Then I went to bed, which seemed appropriate after having warned my children to be extra alert. At that time I had every […]

High Power I am not in synch with time in the Middle East. Events there come at me fully blown and contextualized by others. Being human, and thoroughly relative, my default values are set for the horizon around me. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I still tend to think of the here-and-now as being […]

I wore the green sweater. It took a little searching to find it, since it was right where I left it a year ago. I slipped it on, and it was a little tighter than I remember. But that seems to be the way of things, clothes shrinking mysteriously in the closet when you don’t […]

My grandfather Mike was the last full-blooded Irishman in the family, and his grandfather may have been the first of the family to land on these shores, leaving the forty shades o’ green behind, or the fields that still grew the wheat to make bread for the English table, even as the potatoes took the […]