As I, cough, cough, mentioned last time, I, hack, live in the leafy Washington suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland. Our little town calls itself “Azalea City,” which you’d believe if you stopped by in springtime.  And year ’round, gasp, we live beneath a canopy of big, beautiful trees, including, snort, thousands and thousands of killer […]

Are you into birdhouses?  Barbed Wire?  The flamboyant singer Liberace?  Little flip-open Pez candy dispensers?  How about art made from toast?  Somewhere in America, there’s a museum devoted to it. And another unusual, but grander and eminently justifiable, museum is in the works.  Hundreds of American galleries are devoted to our great cities and the […]

A couple of years ago, Carol and I enjoyed a pleasant visit to the Hawaiian Islands, which form America’s 50th and most remote state about a third of the way across the immense Pacific Ocean.  As we waited at the Honolulu airport prior to flying home, we got to talking with another outbound American. She […]

Last time was the easy part. I’d been wanting to write about New York City, and I focused on the core of the Big Apple — Manhattan Island, whose power, glamour, and jaw-dropping scale form our image of the city as a whole. But there are four other boroughs, or administrative divisions, including one that […]

As the rocker Alice Cooper once put it, I’ve been “Big Apple dreamin’.” For me and anyone else who’s beguiled by New York City’s grandeur and charms, only a few months — a couple of years at most — can pass before the itch to visit again needs scratching. You, too, may have put big, […]

While daring dashes into the unknown can be exhilarating, humans by and large prefer comfortable routines. Especially as we age, sharp course alterations threaten, scare, even debilitate us. “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction […]