Cape Cod Notebook

The most important teacher I ever had was not some Harvard professor, or one of many newspaper editors who carved up my prose. It wasn’t even a person, a whole person anyway. It was an appendage.

My wife Kathy is Jewish, and yet with few exceptions we have had a Christmas tree every year. Well, not explicitly a “Christmas” tree; rather, a Tannenbaum.

Last week I described my first encounter with Walden Pond when I was nineteen, and was disappointed to find it, well, ordinary.

MARCH 2006. This morning at about 4 a.m. the Josephia, a 39-foot scallop vessel out of Stoughton, Maine, went aground just north of the old Eastham Coast…