• With the advent of comfort pets — dogs and cats who are considered service animals because they provide emotional support to their owners — the pet-free hotel room is in danger of becoming as laughable as the no-call list.
• In our 20s and 30s, we kept house as if it were a museum — most times, no one (not even ourselves) could tell that anyone lived here. In our 40s and 50s, we began to tolerate more disorder but still felt a need to vacuum and tidy things up when we expected company. Now, in our 60s, we have reached the point where the ironing board may be left standing in the kitchen overnight, where dishes and wine glasses remain unwashed until morning, and the bed may (rarely) be left unmade. We no longer bother to put away the shoes that sit on the rug next to the door, when guests visit. Maybe it means we are finally free of the obsessions of our parents, of the values that have been devalued without our noticing.
• Older = Wiser. I see this as a pretty good trade-off. Until I stop getting wiser.
• Real friendships involve shared experiences. Friends can invoke past shared experiences for only-so-long until the power of those experiences decays into irrelevance. If you want to be a friend to your friends, don’t just share memories but share more time with them.
• I have exactly three high-school friends. I have blocked every other high-school friend who I knew or vaguely knew — not because I think highly of myself, but because I don’t want to be imprisoned by others’ remembrances of me. So you will never find me at one of my high-school reunions, no matter how few remain. I wish that I were not the product of my high-school town and its junior-high-school values, but in fact I am, and my denial of this reality is rather pathetic.
• “We are experiencing a high volume of calls — a representative will be with you shortly.” Translation: We do not have enough staff, and we don’t intend to do anything about it. You can sit there and wait.
• A morsel of advice to my fellow anchovy-lovers: please do not buy the anchovy filets that are packed in a narrow jar, where each filet is standing on its end. It may look pretty, but the filets are nearly impossible to extract from the jar in one piece, especially after the jar has been refrigerated (per instructions) and the salty oil has turned into a thick crystalline paste that binds the filets together into a mushy mass. No, my friends, if you cherish the taste of a whole anchovy filet on your saltine, your best bet is to stay with the reliable but messy peel-the-lid-back tin can.
• On a political note, not that you really want to hear my political notes: I am voting for Hillary Clinton for one and only one reason — the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. Of course I think she would be a better, more reliable president (strange that I even have to mention reliability as a qualification) than Donald Trump. But unless Clinton inherits a Democratic majority in the Senate, her term in office is likely to play out as Obama III, with McConnell and Ryan determined to obstruct whatever the uppity woman proposes. In the event that the Democrats do not retake control of the Senate, I put 50:50 odds on McConnell refusing to consider any Supreme Court nominee for another four years and actually getting away with it.
• The past tense of gave? I say gavel.
The possessive of grave? Of course, gravel.
And this may not make sense
to the grammatically dense,
but the plural of naval? Try navel.
