One's own flowers and some of one's own vegetables make acceptable, free, self-congratulatory gifts when visiting friends, though giving zucchini - o….

Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappoi….

I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym. All of a sudde….

New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime..

Life, after we'd had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports..

Coaches and headmasters praise sport as a preparation for the great game of life, but this is absurd. Nothing could be more different from life. For ….

To extract the fullest flavor of our drinking house, we needed to spend serious evening time there, slowly coming to know the bartender and the regul….

Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but….

Our Revolution was born and raised in taverns..

The nostalgic notion of the family orchards is lovely - all that wholesome fruit for our forebears to sit on the back steps biting into - but basical….

Cats vary so widely that all data is meaningless and the professional classifiers gnash their teeth trying to come up with even a single fact common ….

Hospitality, or flinging wide the door to friends and wayfarers alike, was once important, back in a world without motels or safety nets, where a fri….

We're a shifty, sliding population. ... What we refer to as 'home' may be a place we haven't seen in years; a place where there's no one left who kno….

A good-looking piece of scenery anywhere delights the eye and elevates the spirits. Some of us, crude creatures that we are, are merely excited; fine….

Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. ... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped ….

No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary..

The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does..

By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog..

My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry; it was their jo….