Last night I had one of our dearest friends for dinner. That’s “have a friend for dinner” as the psychopathic cannibal Hannibal Lecter played by Anthony Hopkins meant it in his closing line of “The Silence of the Lambs”. I ate her alive. Or, for those of a certain age like me who remember the “Point/Counterpoint” sketch in Saturday Night Live of the ‘70s, I was Dan Ackroyd to her Jane Curtin—the guy who responded to each ever-so-reasonable query with a weary, “Jane, you ignor

I felt a twinge of hatred on Saturday. Pure. Unadulterated. And well-aged. It had been instilled in me when I was five years old—seventy-nine years ago. Imagine that. Blindsided at age 84 on a summer outing in coastal Maine. All it took was one glimpse of that accursed symbol. Standing beside some other spectators at the Owl’s Head Transportation Museum’s annual “Wings and Wheels” aerial exhibition, I heard the engines of the World War II fighter planes fire up behind u

The comfy old American plea “Gimme a break!” has been around for a long time. And we all know what it means: “I’m doing the best I can, whether you realize it or not.” And before the recent pandemic of hostility and divisiveness that we’re currently suffering as a society, it often did the trick. The critic backed off a bit, maybe even with a fleeting hint of self-criticism for failing to appreciate the effort going on. But these days it seems a national sport to beat up