Marriage

If you think about it carefully, which I would certainly not advise, the whole idea of being married and living with someone else for decades is basically nuts. The big demographic surprise is not that half of all weddings end up in divorce but that they last at all. It’s been exactly a year since I traveled out of town and overnight, so the opportunity to have spent every one of the last 365 days at home has been a real eye opener in terms of what it takes to get along. Jane and I have been married now for 33 years, 2 months – I know this because we got married on a Jan. 1, so counting is easy. That was exactly a day and a year after we had met – at a small New Year’s Eve party that I later realized was set up all along as a kind of blind date. We were both living and teaching along the Canadian border in way upstate New York. She was at Clarkson University in Potsdam and I was just down the road at St. Lawrence University in Canton. Winters were cold back then. Temperatures of -30 F. were...Read more
Winter

Winter

About half the country is under some sort of extreme winter weather advisory. That includes lots of places where the slightest snow fall or ice sheet produces panic and highway pile ups because folks are simply not accustomed to dealing with such cold and their rear-wheel drive cars are not well-equipped to handle the slick conditions. Here in northern Connecticut we are used to the snow and the ice, which is why lots of people here have Subarus with front-wheel drive and a four-wheel drive option. Our two, with 105,000 and 208,000 miles respectively, have seen their share of storms. With any luck we will hang on to them until they reach the quarter-million mile mark, at which point we’ll consider replacing the worn one. We have a long downhill driveway, 170 feet from the road and sloped at about a steady seven percent. When it ices up or gets snowed in it’s usually easy to negotiate in our cars once we have been dug out by our regular snow plow service. But there is a lot of unevenness to the surface, a condition that is getting worse as freeze-thaw cycles have caused it to buckle over the years. As...Read more
Reading

Reading

One of the unexpected benefits of these last ten months spent basically nesting at home is all the time I’ve had for reading. Not traveling my normal 100-150 days a year has cleared a lot of time. There’s also been a lot less time watching sports, since I find it virtually impossible to get excited about what feel like sanitized, made-for-TV contests in empty stadia. Besides, there’s been something distasteful to me about these athletes getting tested multiple times a week when for so long everyday folks had difficulty finding places where they could find out if they were Covid-infected. So in an unintended form of protest I simply found myself watching sports less and having more time to read. I’ve always been an avid reader. As a kid I split my time between baseball biographies (“The Lew Burdette Story”) and American history.  For my bar mitzvah I was thrilled to receive two tomes that I cherished and still have: Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports and William Manchester’s account of the JFK assassination, Death of a President. I can easily call up the emotions I had as a young teen during a rare conversation with my otherwise distracted, engineering-oriented father...Read more
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