From saunter to strut we walk through life, hoofing a dance from time to time. Charlie Chaplin did a duck waddle and Michael Jackson moon-walked. Storks stalk, soldiers march. I have a friend who has...

Use it or lose it is an old adage, tried and true, that can be applied to a craftsman’s legerdemain, pasture lands or legal stratagems. If you wrote a song on the hit parade, record another...

“Not for love or money,” our hero might declare in an old movie when declining an unsavory proposal. And indeed the three cliché motivations in life are said to be money, fame or power....

My Stars, Lands Sake!, people used to say when the sky still had stars, people worked the land and didn’t want to take the Lord’s name in vain.Grandpa might be an old billygoat and...

Atomized, in smithereens, we won der if our culture is becoming so, as mainstream churches, labor unions, political parties, handshake friendships, teller banking, are discarded in favor of...

Kids have multiple ways to become opaque beyond a parent’s comfort zone with texty tablets and other rabbit holes, while the wealthy climate-hop from spruce to palm. America has a dazzling name...

A thin smile, a bright smile or beamish grin. From infancy we learn that widening our mouths wins approval from the universe of strangers inhabiting the earth, a ticket toward admission. Sycophants...

A dog is not a slave, but a friend. It’s important to remember that its shorter life should be rich and full like ours. That miraculous nose bringing in hundreds of times as much information as...

To have and to hold, we say in a wedding ceremony because marriage involves holding as well as mere possession. In sickness and in health is also an important stipulation, though few “pre-nup...

To live is to see, I always believed, along the waterfronts of Manhattan, Mumbai and Mombasa, gorges in the Himalayas and Alpes, Maritimes, Alaska, Uganda. What could be better? I stuttered badly for...