For more than forty years now, my family has vacationed in a small cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, near the tiny village of Laurel Springs. We built the cabin in the early 1970s, though we began visiting the area long before that. My father first came with my mother and sister in […]
In the fall of 1961, my family moved from Greenville, South Carolina, where I was born in June that year, to a little town in east Tennessee called LaFollette, where my father had his first medical practice. LaFollette was a poor, rural community; and my father, 30 years old and just a year out of […]
It was late August, 2006. I had just moved to western Massachusetts, and I needed to figure out how I was going to get to work every day from my home in Northampton to my office at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, seven miles away. In the weeks leading up to the start of fall […]
Our nation’s love affair with the car continues to wane. As the New York Times reported recently, “Americans are buying fewer cars, driving less and getting fewer licenses as each year goes by.” This decrease in “automobility” is especially striking for young Americans, who are clearly less smitten with the car than their parents were […]
I came to Middlebury, Vermont, last week on family business. I like to think I would have explored, and documented, any place where I was staying for nine days, especially if it was late spring in the northern hemisphere. And I’m sure I would have brought my bicycle, even if it was not a traditionally […]
The skies were bright blue and the sun blazing, but there was a steady breeze off the water – at times you almost felt you needed a sweater. We walked on the boardwalk in Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, lay on the sand until someone told us we needed a pass, drank coffee in an […]
City of Rhetoric 