PHILADELPHIA — It is 2 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. I am sitting in a hotel bathroom typing away because insomnia has again rudely reared its annoying head on our first night of a short trip to this historic city. I am trying not to wake my Beautiful Mystery Companion. The bathroom is the only place to not do so, without heading down to the lobby. The clatter of the hotel room door opening and closing into the hallway would no doubt wake her. Best to hide in the bathroom, laptop on the sink counter, the room’s only chair rolled inside. I keep banging my knees against the shelf beneath the sink,...
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“I’m 95 [expletive] years old with one foot in the grave and I can barely move. I know I’m in overtime. So everything in your life becomes more meaningful.
And one of the last things I want to be able to see is for the Celtics to hang up banner No. 18.”
— Bob Cousy, Boston Celtics, 1950-1963
Bob Cousy got his wish.
Cousy is generally considered the greatest point guard of his era. He played on six NBA championship teams when I was a young child growing up in New Hampshire, listening to gravelly voiced announcer Johnny Most call the games on AM radio. I was 8 when the “Houdini...
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More (mis)adventures in hobby farming, here at Three Geese Farm, where recent torrential rains threatened to send Glade and Witcher creeks out of banks and left a chunk of our land temporarily submerged.
I fear the imminent official arrival of summer mirrors last year, when the deluges of late spring promptly stopped as a heat dome covered the state and rudely refused to leave. Not that there is much to be done, other than endure it and plot escape routes to cooler climes. The grass grows ridiculously quickly as I watch helplessly, since the zero-turn mower is still in the shop, awaiting replacement...
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“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice!”
— Umberto Eco
My medicine/book closet, as Italian historian and philosopher Umberto Eco charmingly called it, is mighty close to full. The only solution, of course, is to build more bookshelves — more space for additional medicine to cure what ails me. Or at least to help...
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