I was sitting on my front porch in Millerton when I heard the sounds of a concert band whose brassy notes drifted over my neighbors’ trees and lured me, like a siren-song, down to the center of town. As I walked down the hill, the music grew louder. It was an astounding piece of music: [...]

The face was weathered, etched by a lifetime of carrying a very heavy weight. The gait was slightly awkward; he’d lost his left leg below the knee in 2003, a casualty of diabetes. But on this night last winter, as fans clustered around him at Fred Biletnikoff’s anti-drug foundation dinner in a hotel ballroom south [...]

Cracked king crab legs on ice with assorted sauces? Strip loin with cilantro pesto and spring green beans? Or maybe a customized omelette, with only the freshest of farmers-market ingredients? I was paralyzed by indecision. So I finally opted for a plate of sushi, featuring a crab roll that rivaled any I had ever [...]

It should have been front-page news. It wasn’t, and I don’t know why, because it was the scariest story I’d heard in a long, long time. It was the announcement last month from a private school in Massachusetts called Cushing Academy that the school was selling off or giving away [...]

And so ends another summer of empty lawns. They were green lawns, they were well-mown lawns, but they were empty lawns: Another whole baseball season, come and gone, when I didn’t see a single kid playing catch with his dad at dusk, or on a Saturday morning. With his brother. With his sister. I didn’t [...]

On a tree-filled state university campus, amid the song of crickets in the bushes, and the notes of a distant bell-tower, and the sound of cleats tearing through grass, and the slaps of leather footballs against hands, I found the face of the National Football League this week.
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A few days ago, I happened to be talking to a guy named Fred Biletnikoff. Fred used to be very good at catching footballs for the Oakland Raiders in the Sixties and Seventies. Then, he had a little help at it. Fred always had this stuff called Stick Um on his hands. It was orange, [...]

A couple of Sunday mornings ago I scanned the front page of the New York Times and noticed immediately that something was strange and different: There were three stories that made me smile, and feel optimistic about the future. This was way beyond the usual quota of smiley stories on the Times’ front page, which, [...]

The poison-ivy on the fingers of my right hand a few weeks ago was a welcome sign; the little blisters told me that it is spring, and I am playing golf again. This is an annual rite, and I celebrate it: every year, as the fairways thaw and the flags re-appear like perennial flowers and [...]

A few years ago, escaping a blizzard in western New York, I got off the highway in a small city named Salamanca, and took refuge in a railroad depot that had been turned into a museum. Salamanca was once a vibrant hub of four different railroads, and its museum was a lovely old wooden building, [...]