ItsOnlyBob

Christmas Day and Mother's Day go hand-in-hand for me ... or maybe more like hand-in-stocking. Since my childhood, Christmas has always begun the same way: We tear into stockings Mom knitted just for us, each one made in time for our own first Christmas. My brother and sisters have stockings just like mine. So do our spouses, kids and grandkids ,  plus a few ex- and almost-spouses and various others.  Mom copied the pattern from the stocking of a family friend, counting stitch-by-stitch and recording it on graph paper to make her first stocking in 1955 , for my sister Becky. She used that same pattern to make her 30th stocking in 2010,  for my granddaughter Ava — Mom's second great-grandchild. My favorite Christmas memory is of waking before dawn with my siblings and plundering our stockings, knowing they held enough treasure to tide us over until breaking light made it safe to nag our parents out of bed to open presents. We rummaged through a king's ra...

Every Election Day, I mourn a friendship killed by political “discourse.” I met this friend in college. He was brilliant and intense, with a finely tuned sense of humor steeped in Monty Python and Firesign Theater. He was also kind and thoughtful. When I came to Washington, DC, in 1993 for a job interview, my friend—by then a bureaucrat living in Northern Virginia—offered me a futon to sleep on. One evening, our conversation veered into politics. I mostly just listened as he talked—and talk he did, with breathtaking ferocity. At one point, his phone rang: “Hello? … Oh, hi, Mom. Hey, can I call you back? I’m in the middle of a tirade.” He hung up and jumped right back in. I’d never given my own political opinions much critical thought before then—like many people, I just followed my parents’ lead. My discomfort at that moment had less to do with the fact that I found myself disagreeing with my friend's views, and more to do with my feeling suddenly trapped in a conversation I wasn...

Researchers recently uncovered previously unknown correspondence among the Founding Fathers that sheds new light on the process of dissolving political bands, declaring independence, pledging sacred honor and so forth. Who knew? (Click on the picture to make it bigger.)