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 …
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 …
When we lived in Philadelphia, I used to read a daily column in the Philadelphia Inquirer written by a sportswriter named Bob Ford. I also played softball every Sunday with a guy named Bob Ford. At first it did not occur to me that the Bob Ford I played softball with every Sunday had anything to do with the Bob …
The Washington Post held a contest a couple of years ago in which it asked school teachers to send in examples of the worst analogies they had ever encountered in grading student papers. Below, with thanks to Ruth Hamburger, are some of my favorites. He was as tall as a 6’3” tree. John and Mary had never met. They were …
Back in the days my children were involved in organized sports, coaches liked to tell the story of how former NBA Superstar Michael Jordan was cut from his 10th grade basketball team. The story tended to come out right before cuts were made, presumably to ease the sting for those kids who weren’t going to make the team. The notion …
During my freshman year at college, there was an older guy at my fraternity everyone used to call “Heeb-heimer.” That was a play on his real name, which was Hartheimer. He was Jewish. I used to call him that too. Actually, I called him “Hee-Heimer.” I had never heard of someone being called a “Heeb” before, and since he was …