Opinion

These Monday holidays keep newspapermen hopping.

In the warmer months, I spend a lot of time in the backyard, often beneath the cooling shade of our giant oak tree.

I went up the coast of Maine last week and came across a wonderful little café and it was so good I pulled out my pad and pen and sat writing for a couple hours.

What a day to begin a new week.

Over the last month, I’ve been spending time on the weekends helping a close friend work on cleaning out her dear mother’s home.

A dear friend once said to me out of the blue, “Today it will have been forty years since the last time I vomited,” and I said to her, “How do you celebrate an anniversary like that?” It was a witty moment, one of many in our friendship, and if we’d only collected them all, we could sit down and write a Cole Porter musical, but we didn’t and anyway Cole Porter isn’t so hip anymore and we’re busy doing other things.I, for one, have been on a tour doing a one-man show and having a great time until last week in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, after a dinner of six oysters on the half shell, clam chowder, and a lobster roll, I awoke at 4 a.m.

It has been an unusually pleasant week.

Last weekend, I was able to make a rare escape out of town for a couple of days, visiting a a rural retreat transformed from a 1920s school for the blind into a hotel/convention center/and so much more.The weekend happened to be a slow one for Buffalo Ridge Resort and Spa, and so much of the staff had time for conversation as we were on the first night at least, the only two guests.

The phrase “back to school” means different things to different people.