At the first sign of spring in my neighborhood, from the top of the street to the bottom, out come the boats. They sit on trailers or atop Subarus and SUVs. They lean against fences and languish in driveways. The street itself becomes an asphalt river, a runway for a beauty contest of boats. Brad, up the hill, is heading to the San Juan with a load of new...
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Ever since we discovered the existence of dinosaurs, there’s been a subset of the population, and not just children, whose fascination with them and admiration for them should have warned us, decades ago, of the particular future we find ourselves in now. Brawn is a word not often used in the new vocabulary of our time, yet it is more and more at the root...
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This is the story of a deer, a man, a woman, a tree and two funerals. It takes place in Georgia, down near the Florida line, on a hunting plantation that belongs to my father’s brother. It’s no Tara and the house on the land is no Twelve Oaks. It’s a modern house, simple and practical and beautiful in its practicality. It sits on a rise with a view of...
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If the ‘50s was not a shining moment in human history, the decade at least landed us with an abundance of game shows. Truth or Consequences, The Price Is Right, Queen for a Day, and a few years later, Let’s Make a Deal. These were the four that played at our house, and I considered it daytime TV at its finest. How I became a game show aficionado puzzled me...
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The story goes that when my father’s parents divorced when he was eight, the reason given was not infidelity, moral lassitude, or drunkenness, but messiness. Theirs was an example of the inability of two people to share a life when one was messy and one was neat. There are many apocryphal stories in my family and this may be one of them, but I suspect...
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