Camouflage At the end of the day, or at least in the part approaching twilight, I sometimes look back toward morning and wonder if I should have done something differently. Yesterday was wild and blowing wet. I’m not sure I could have done it differently, even if I had thought about it. The first call at […]

It is January, and there are thunderstorms and rain coming this long dark day. The harbingers of Spring are inserted into Winter, which has a long way to go. Or at least it did when the calendar made sense. �The World Turned Upside Down,� is the tune that the British military band played as they […]

Tuesday’s Child It is a confused morning, thunderstorms beckoning, rain for sure. The clock radio has conspired to let me sleep; the terrorists on the television have joined the conspiracy, hooking me once again on Keifer Sutherland’s quirky television show with the strange hourly format �24.� I approached oblivion last with the weak, vacillating President […]

The Chief I was sitting with Jim and Joe in the center aisle of Hall B1, on the ground floor of the San Diego Convention Center . Outside the breeze blew in from the Bay, and the water glittered and life was a sweet as only it can be in SOCAL. We were out of Washington, which […]

Fog It might have come in on little cat’s feet, I don’t know. It was as quiet as a thief in the night, or an assassin. It must have come in the small hours and was answered by the long low-throated bleeting of the horns from the shipyards down toward 32 nd Street. The sound […]

Pottery Barn I don’t have anything burning off my fingertips this morning; goodness knows I should be concentrating on Judge Alito’s confirmation, or the bird flu, or how to defeat improvised explosive devices. I can’t do it, though. I am concentrated on the little things, and am prepared to let the larger world spin on […]

The Minister of Meaning I forgot that S amuel Ichiye Hayakawa was born in Vancouver, Canada, and I forgot that he was elected to the United States Senate. I remember that he liked jazz, and that he was President of San Francisco State College, and that he was one of the few who spoke with […]

Small Fish I got it backwards, and as it turned out, the right way. If I had been watching Pappa Joe’s Penn State finally win a triple-overtime contest over Bobby Bowden’s Seminole’s in the Orange Bowl, I would have heard that the trapped miners in West Virginia were rescued. I assume that good news was […]

Quiet Week The quiet week is over, or at least the quiet here in Arlington . The affairs of the world have continued as we boxed up the decorations. I got the willies when I heard about the miners trapped a mile underground in West Virginia . I thought of all that dirt and rock […]

Both Hands Tied “Muslim Scholars Paid to Aid U.S. !” shouts the headline in the Times this morning. My goodness, I thought. Headlines shouldn’t shout . They should just Bold themselves. And besides, if you are attempting to fight an implacable foe without using every trick in the book, wouldn’t you be fighting with your […]