29. Father Knows Best: The End, or One End
If books end, so do phases of life, though they refuse to stop blending, one with another. The London excursion [...]
Runaway truck
My latest cleaning lady is like a heavy-load truck with slashed tires that keeps on coming. She’s Bulgarian by birth, [...]
Buone cose
Language is at its best when it spits at by-now universal idioms. France of another era insisted it would never [...]
28. Father Knows Best: Mrs. Margaret
My much-anticipated VC-10 adventure did not go quite as planned, and yet again, it was my father’s uncanny sense of [...]
“I want to die”
My friend’s line had me by the throat: I want to die. I get it in phone calls and in [...]
27. Father Knows Best: Walter Lord
To get to New York we retraced our off-to-Spain steps of four years before. Only this time, without my mother [...]
Because you can
Since the West went to war to excise its two cancers, Nazism and Communism, its moral compass malfunctioned, jiggered by [...]
26. Father Knows Best: The “Californian” in the Dark
As a lover of old magazines and illustrated books, I found subjects of interest my father never discussed. In a [...]
On Kissinger
My father roundly disliked Henry Kissinger. Hindsight suggests this was prompted, at least at first, by the young Kissinger's more-than-willing [...]
25. Father Knows Best: Home and General
Though my mother was gone and my switchboard heartbreak was still raw, home remained a sweet place, mostly because its [...]
Misunderstanding General Giáp
Amy Bernstein was over and under and into the moon, and I was, by chance, the only boy within reach [...]
24. Father Knows Best: Marcia
My tiff with Pussy Galore and Mrs. Conte came not long after Samantha’s tomboy reassurances had seemed to defang the [...]