I look forward to seeing him every morning. We do our little exchange, our private joke, and then we fist bump, and I continue onto the metro smiling and in much better spirits.

This is why we say goodbye.  Letting go is what it comes to.

My wife has a history of agreeing to rent or buy the first place we visit whenever we are looking for a place to live. This is great, she says. We’ll take it.

Guest Post by Raymond Koehler on “Trump as Tragic Hero”

A close relative — someone I have admired my entire life — is photographed wearing a red MAGA hat. It is one of the most upsetting photographs I have ever seen.

“Please hold for the President of the United States.” What could be more exciting than to receive a telephone call with these words?

People laugh at your jokes when you are in a position of power. They return your phone calls. Our attention-seeking president is in for one rude awakening.

This, for now, is our piece of earth. I clear away the brush and stack the wood in a pile near the shed and think: This is the possible we hold so briefly to.

Thirty-five years ago, my wife would take a break from her law school studies to join me in the tiny bedroom of our apartment to watch a half hour of TV before bed. The world seemed so big back then; our concerns in retrospect so small.

Jackson spoke with three separate women, and he was a different person depending on which of the women he was on the phone with. He had phone sex with one woman.

Mike O’Neill of “Mike and Heather” has died. We drive up to the wake in Lansford, Pennsylvania. It is reassuring to see Heather and their four adult children.

My wife and I have gone full circle. We started off our lives together in a small rental apartment in D.C. Three kids, four cities, six houses and a lifetime later, we are now back in a small rental apartment in D.C.

We were not the first tourists to visit the village of Tolo. But we were the first foreign family to spend a significant amount of time there — six months in 1972 followed by multiple summers. And with seven of us in the family, including five children, it was inevitable we would make a lot of friends.   Forty-seven years after …

During the second week of our empty-nesting, Susan and I take the train up to New York.  She is accepting an award from SELF magazine as a “woman doing good.” I hang out at the hotel drafting a brief while she does publicity and makeup things at SELF.  Then we head over to Riverpark, a restaurant on the East River, …

I got held up on my way to Union Station today.  Or at least I think I did. I had finished up early at court and was heading over to the station to catch the next MARC train, and I was walking through what you could euphemistically call a “transitional” neighborhood near the food kitchen on E Street. I was …

You buy an axe.  The axe consists of two parts, a handle and a blade. After six months, the blade breaks and you replace it with another one. After another six months, the handle breaks and you replace it with another handle. The question they ask in your Philosophy 101 class in college is this:  Is this the same axe …

So I walk into the building for a meeting with our new banker in Baltimore, and I notice that everyone seems to be unusually surly towards me. The security guard tells me to take off my hat, and when I tell him who I want to meet with, he motions me toward a row of chairs and then ignores me …

My children are pleasantly surprised when they see the new house and neighborhood. They are city kids at heart. Although a bicycle is stolen from the garage within moments of our arrival, the perpetrators taking advantage of moving men preoccupied with something going on inside the house, the children walk to the hardware store for some extra surge protectors and …

Having sold our house in Virginia, we are now renting it back from the new owners. We will do this until we move to Baltimore in July. No longer an owner of this house, I step out of the shower this morning to find a tree guy poking around in our back yard. I stick my head out the back …

A couple of years ago, shortly after we moved back to Arlington, I decided to stroll by our old house, just a mile or so from where we live now. I was standing in front of the house, admiring the improvements the new owners had made to the front yard, when the woman drove up in her mini-van. I was …

My wife is not real picky. That is fortunate for me. Otherwise, she might never have decided to marry me. We were visiting different neighborhoods in Baltimore this past weekend in advance of a possible move there next summer, and we happened to run into a woman on the street who turned out to be realtor. The woman was the …

I am standing with my niece in front of my father’s bureau, and I show her the gold-plated watch with the “Hamilton” typed out across its face.  My father loved pocket watches and there are a couple of them still sitting on his bureau so it takes me a moment to find the right one.  The watch I select is …

He was the angry and alienated younger brother of my best friend while I was growing up. My mother sent me newspaper clippings about him when he was a member of a grunge rock band of local renown. She didn’t need to send me anything when he became nationally and then internationally known:  Spin magazine put him on its cover …

Here are 11 rules for effective writing, with thanks to Kendall Gray of The Appellate Record for reminding me of them: Avoid alliteration. Always. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with. Avoid clichés like the plague.  (They’re old hat.) Eschew ampersands and abbreviations, etc. One should never generalize. Comparisons are as bad as clichés. Be more or less specific. …

He was the best octopus hunter in Tolo. It was always an honor whenever he sent one of us boys out to the kiosk to buy him cigarettes:  Karelia ke spirta, parakalo. It was an even bigger honor if he invited you along to hunt for octopus. He did the diving. You stayed on the surface, holding onto the octopi he …

It is hard not to like someone who has thrown in her lot – however temporary that may be – with one of your children.
She is obviously a person of good taste.

We have been coming to Cape Cod with my extended family now for 25 years.  We came first as couples. Then we came with children. With the 13 cousins growing up and the rest of us just getting old, it is unclear how many more years we will cross the Sagamore Bridge to make this trip.  Like a game of …

Ten years ago this month, I walked out of the Ronald Reagan Building carrying a single cardboard box. Having just resigned from the federal government, the box contained all I had to show after an 18-year career:  a coffee mug, photographs, some personal papers, and the plaque they had just given me at a going-away party. The last thing I …

It must be pretty intimidating to arrive at the courthouse for trial to find five police officers, an eyewitness, and a complaining witness all sitting in the hallway, laughing and joking with each other and then growing silent as you pass by – all of them there for the sole purpose of testifying against you, their bond a common interest …

My wife complains about all the closet space I take up with my neckties. I do have lots of them. You see, I have this theory about ties, a theory that was finally confirmed by the guy who sells me my clothes. If you keep wearing the same tie, the tie will refuse to lie flat after a couple of …

The “Family Tree” people from Belchertown have taken down most of the big trees in my parents’ yard.  My oldest sister – the one who helps my mother with her finances — hired them to do some trimming. They came back when my sister wasn’t there, again and again, each time getting my mother – always so cheerful, always so …

  A number of years ago, while on vacation in Miami, my family and I were sitting in a restaurant when a man approached the table and handed my then 15-year-old daughter a paper rose.  Angered by the intrusion, I took the rose from my daughter and tried to hand it back to him.  The man refused to take it.  …

Many of the rude words and gestures I know today I learned from driving with my father while growing up. I didn’t learn these things from my father, because I never once heard him utter a bad word. It wasn’t that using a curse word was in bad taste, though he clearly thought that too. It was that it was …

  Snow I wake, and think so this is how it comes, no thunder, wind, or windstorm’s violence to rend our lower nature, only a presence. Outlines are familiar: light was present yesterday. Without event the miracle is here. Given the day, let crystal loose on me, to see beyond the accident of snow, this brilliance touched with rose. @ …

  This is four or five years ago:  I drive my father to the dentist.  My father has been going to this same dentist for 50 years. The dentist used to clean my teeth. Once, when I was about 10 years old, he walked out into the waiting area during a break and announced to the receptionist – within hearing …

  On Twitter, we can hear Mirriam Seddiq swearing for five hours because she is stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the beltway.  It’s because of the snow.   “3 miles,” she writes.  “Haven’t come across a lot to leave the car in.  Or neighborhood.  When I do I’m gonna hoof it.” At 7:00 pm, my wife calls from traffic at a …

My mother fell on the ice in front of her house and broke her shoulder. She lay in the snow for 15 minutes before the emergency response people arrived. My two sisters who live in the area can only take off so much time from work.  So I find myself on a train heading back to Massachusetts to spend some …

I stand by the bed.  The fingers of your hand are loose and warm, and though your eyes are closed your head is toward me.  Are you sleeping, in the country you have got to?  On pathways of the blood you have withdrawn, walking younger with each step.  The scene is in neutral tones, subdued as it is in dreams, …

  Every summer for the past 25 years, my wife and I have gone up to Cape Cod to spend a week with my family.  The family used to cram itself into a three or four bedroom house my eldest sister rented in Orleans.  As the family got larger with more in-laws and kids, we moved to a nine bedroom …