Humoring depression
Like a lounge lizard on mean-street rounds, depression makes itself at home with carcinogenic panache. Panache inverted to suit goblets [...]
19. Spain: The End of the Affair
Ah, girls. What little boy under age ten, however partisan to his lizardly reptilian tribe, could simply pretend they did [...]
One man’s “ferragosto”
No European capital sheds its August citizenry as decisively as Rome. The exodus is a literal rite of passage. [...]
18. Spain: General Ohio
We first visited the American air base at Torrejón in the weeks following the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was an [...]
Almond’s conquest
Staring into his green-gold eyes, half closed in contentment, I stroke the top of his head and say to him, [...]
Brave new verbs
Long time, no see — or something like that. What happened? We moved. And moving takes all the fun out [...]
17. Spain: A word on bikinis
A critical part of my father’s job in Spain was to promote tourism using the many contacts he had accumulated [...]
Tiger and snake
During my first decades in Rome, which began in earnest almost exactly fifty years ago, I kept a cellophane scrapbook [...]
In the heat of the moment
It is 11 a.m. on what has for days been billed as Rome’s hottest summer day so far. This is [...]
Dad’s heroes
My father was born in 1918. That birthdate put him squarely in what journalist Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation. [...]