One of the small intrigues of being a newspaperman is that I never know what’s going to show up in my mailbox. The other day, for example, I slit open an envelope and found three energy bars waiting inside, sent along by a publicist hoping to promote the latest in American nutrition. The snacks, I’m told, were … Continue reading →

The recent death of Roger Ebert was a reminder that as a film critic, he had many imitators, yet no real equals. Ebert and his friendly rival, fellow film critic Gene Siskel, popularized the thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating system while assessing the latest movies on their syndicated review show, “At the Movies.” The format proved so … Continue reading →

The days grow longer at this time of year, but they never seem long enough. Or so I was reminded a few weekends ago, when a Saturday set aside to do a lot yielded very little in the ledger of personal accomplishment. I had meant to mow … Continue reading →

Rising from bed the other morning, I could feel south Louisiana springtime settling into its familiar, tropical self. The room was slightly muggy, a hint of coming weeks when the air conditioner will have to run full tilt to keep us cool. I made coffee in the darkened kitchen, switched on a ceiling fan in the study … Continue reading →

With the arrival of Easter last weekend, spring gardening season officially arrived at our house. Every Easter, after breakfasting on boiled eggs and bits of chocolate, going to church to sing the old hymns of renewal and resurrection, then having lunch and seconds and rounds of coffee, we usually turn the table conversation to talk of … Continue reading →

For this Easter, I decided to tint a few eggs the way my late Aunt Clara once did — by steeping them in red onion skins instead of commercial dye. Aunt Clara learned the technique on a Depression-era farm, where store-bought egg dye wasn’t handy. She was still coloring Easter eggs with onion skins by the time I … Continue reading →

There are only a few days in Louisiana, in early spring or late fall, when the weather is neither too hot nor too cold, allowing us to leave our doors and windows open without discomfort or mosquitoes. Such a day arrived a couple of Sundays ago, when my wife suggested that we open both of the French … Continue reading →

If you’re visiting this space today to find “Attic Salt,” the Ed Cullen column that appeared here for many years, then you’re sadly out of luck. Ed retired last week, and “Attic Salt” retired with him. If you missed Ed’s farewell column last week, you can read it at http://www.theadvocate.com. Each Sunday, my “At Random” column, a … Continue reading →

I’m moving this weekend, and I hope you’ll come along. After 22 years of appearing in the Friday People section, this column, “At Random,” will be published in the Sunday People section instead. Longtime Advocate columnist Ed Cullen is retiring today, and his popular Sunday column, “Attic Salt,” is retiring with him. I’m … Continue reading →

As I ripen into middle age, my shelves bulge with more books than I will ever read, and there’s no real need to buy any more of them. But my neighbor, Zelda Long, who died recently, was a longtime volunteer for LSU’s Book Bazaar, and to honor her memory, I went to the bazaar last week … Continue reading →

The trees are mostly bare this month but are beginning to fill in, and they seem like the stud frames of a building under construction. The threadbare trees remind me that spring, officially three weeks away, is very much a work in progress. I like looking at the treeline each morning and spotting a stray birds’ nest … Continue reading →

For a long time now, I’ve known when to start cutting my yard each year. The lawn usually gets shaggy around St. Patrick’s Day, a bright green holiday that neatly coincides with the greening of turf beyond my window. It’s a small rule of thumb that tells me the world still makes sense, and I embrace it as … Continue reading →

Henry David Thoreau, who advised his readers to avoid any enterprises requiring new clothes, might have been skeptical about the camping trip that my 12-year-old son and I took between Christmas and New Year’s. Although we’re not creatures of fashion, the bill at a local sporting-goods store quickly exceeded 100 bucks as we filled the shopping buggy with … Continue reading →

Many years ago, the British writer V.S. Pritchett shared an anecdote about a test pilot he knew who had built a room where he could occasionally be alone with his thoughts. The pilot, Pritchett recalled, “had a lighting system which indicated to people outside whether he was accessible to the world or not.” Pritchett offered no other details … Continue reading →

A quarter of a century ago, when I was a young reporter still new to the toils of daily journalism, I arrived at work one morning to discover that a curious assignment had landed on my desk. A family of eagles had made a nest near the roadside in St. Tammany Parish, and my editor wanted … Continue reading →

When my wife and I started dating 20 years ago, she’d often invite me over for Sunday brunch — a ritual that included midmorning pancakes, a shared newspaper and, almost invariably, strains of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” humming from her stereo. Because my thoughts of that time are caught up in my memories of being in love, I … Continue reading →

If you’re still looking for a New Year’s resolution this month, here’s a suggestion: Knock on a neighbor’s door, and ask him over for dinner. I thought about this on New Year’s Day, when our neighbor, Zelda, died after a long and valiant struggle with cancer. While talking with Zelda a few months after moving … Continue reading →

The holidays seemed off-key for me this winter. Sickness ran through my circle of friends and loved ones, and December’s calendar included a few funerals. Coupled with the headlines announcing school shootings and political discord, the season’s happenings felt not quite so merry or bright. Happily, though, some yuletide cheer arrived in my wife’s Christmas stocking in … Continue reading →

Watch enough movies and TV shows, and you get a common idea of librarians. Popular culture typically depicts them as pinched souls behind big wooden desks, alternately trying to escape the world or shush it into submission. My Aunt Eunice, who died last month at 94, was an abiding reminder for me that librarians don’t always or … Continue reading →

A year weighs 7.8 ounces, which I learned the other day when, indulging curiosity, I put my 2012 wall calendar on the office postage scale and read the result. The calendar will soon descend, like a dying moon, from the wall near my desk where it’s presided over the past 12 months, charting the … Continue reading →

My son turned 12 this month, and he marked the occasion by taking a horseback ride at a local stable. During his hour on the trail, I stayed behind in the stable alone, savoring a rare bit of solitude in the midst of the holiday season. Nothing that morning really spoke of Christmas. The … Continue reading →

For several weeks now, more by accident than design, I’ve been indulging that guiltiest of pleasures, peeking into other people’s diaries and journals. I started with Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Against The Wind,” a new sampling of her journal and letters, and then a copy of the diary and letters of American diplomat Elihu Washburne arrived at my … Continue reading →

We’ve all heard about the contentment of cows, although I’m not quite sure why cows should be more serene than the rest of us. But I had time to give the matter some thought last month when I spent the night in a nearby cow pasture — a fair enough laboratory, I suppose, for considering the bovine … Continue reading →

When my family returned home from our day in the country on Thanksgiving, the afternoon was nearly spent, with long shadows inching up the lawn as the sun slowly slipped toward the horizon. By the time I leashed our terrier for his evening walk, the neighborhood was mostly quiet and dark, except for a constellation of lights in … Continue reading →

In a year of grim headlines — war abroad, monster storms and political scandal at home — here’s some good news from a recent edition of The New York Times: So many good books have been published this fall that bookstores, publicists and reviewers are having a hard time keeping track of them all. This … Continue reading →

Live in a tent for a week, as I did this summer during a campout with my son’s Boy Scout troop, and you get a good lesson in what you really need, and what you can do without. In a space the size of a small bathroom, I placed a portable bed, a sack of clothes, … Continue reading →

When our terrier arrived to live with us a couple of summers ago, he was described as a quiet dog who nevertheless could be expected to sound an alarm when gas-powered weeders came within earshot. True to his billing, Foster barks without end when I crank up my power weeder, and he doesn’t care for anything else with … Continue reading →

After Hurricane Isaac blew through town and knocked out the electricity, our family sat in a darkened living room and listened for news of the storm’s path up the state. Gathered around the portable radio, we looked like a period portrait — a throwback to the Depression-era days when husbands and wives, sons and daughters routinely rallied … Continue reading →

Although he’s best known as a novelist, Nicholson Baker also writes essays from time to time for various magazines around the country. “The Way the World Works,” Baker’s new book, collects his magazine work from the past few years. I have a soft spot for Baker’s latest book because it includes some kind words for … Continue reading →

Just as there are Easter Christians and Christmas Christians — worshipers who attend church only on high religious holidays — so I have neighbors who seem to take walks only in spring and autumn, when the weather is best for a stroll. Because my doctor and my dog make me do it, I try to walk each … Continue reading →

We had my high school 30-year reunion this summer in a reception hall that was once the site of a new car lot in my hometown. As a teenager, I’d often pass by that spot and see customers trading in old models for new ones. Entering my reunion this year, I wondered what it might be like … Continue reading →

There was no flourish of trumpets when I rose from bed last Saturday, no popping of champagne corks, no dropping of a glittering ball in Times Square. Across the country, the first official day of autumn appeared to pass with little public notice. Fall brings not one but many firsts, and perhaps no one can … Continue reading →

As I was reminded during Hurricane Isaac, writing gets harder with the threat of disaster. It’s trickier to finish an essay, story or book review when you’re thinking, instead, about the speed of the wind, the strength of your roof, the age of the neighborhood trees. But worsdmiths who need a role model for writing under … Continue reading →

My family didn’t plan on guests during Hurricane Isaac, but as weather experts like to tell us, one should expect the unexpected when a big storm rolls through. Our visitor arrived a few hours into a five-day power outage, after we’d opened the back door to ventilate the airless house, then started a game of Monopoly … Continue reading →

Once again, summer in south Louisiana is concluding with a bang rather than a whimper, as a hurricane punctuated the lead-up to Labor Day. The prospect of cooler temperatures — and the eventual end of hurricane season — has made the approach of autumn especially welcome in our part of the country after Isaac blew through town. Continue reading →

Watching coverage of the Olympics this month reminded me of how deeply television has shaped my view of England. For decades before she ever landed in London, the late American author Helene Hanff visited England vicariously through its writers. “I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going … Continue reading →

To get in a morning walk before driving my son to school, I’ve been rising shortly before dawn this August and greeting the day as the fishermen do, by getting dressed in the dark. Flipping switches might stir the rest of the family, so I gather my clothes by the faint light that comes in … Continue reading →

In summer, our house exhales, loosens its belt and becomes a more relaxed version of its already relaxed self. Board games colonize the coffee table, lingering for weeks. Beach towels festoon bedposts and bathroom racks, their colors as vivid as the pennants of a sailing regatta. Young adult paperbacks wedge between … Continue reading →

Several days into our recent trip to the beach, a visit that included a boat excursion and some shopping, the kids awakened and began asking what we were going to do next. “What we should do,” my mother-in-law suggested, “is nothing. Doing nothing is what vacations are supposed to be about.” Summer is ideally … Continue reading →

The first summer of my marriage some two decades ago endures in memory as a season softened by rain. Each afternoon, or so it seemed, with the regularity of a train schedule, a light shower arrived to anoint our first garden and break the fever of the day. Our new garden hose lay most of the … Continue reading →

Take a dozen men, drop them in the woods for seven days without television and reliable cellphone and Internet service, then see what happens. That premise might sound like a college psychology experiment, but it’s a fair description of a week I spent with 11 other fathers when we chaperoned a Boy Scout camp in … Continue reading →

As a child of the South, I usually vacation to escape the heat rather than confront it. Summer trips typically take me in search of cool ocean breezes or mild mountain air. But last week, I spent many of my hours away from the office in temperatures at or above 100 degrees. That’s what happened … Continue reading →

My wife has a software application that helps her squirrel away stories she finds on the Internet so she can read them later. It’s a high-tech version of a tattered manila folder I’ve kept for years. Into this folder goes the kind of long-form journalism that certainly would make me smarter, wiser and more cosmopolitan, if only … Continue reading →

“The beach,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh told readers in 1955, “is not the place to work; to read, write or think . . . Too warm, too damp, too soft for any real mental discipline . . .” I thought about this last week as I stood near a writing desk at a beach house in Destin, … Continue reading →

As another Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking about Clifton Webb, one of Hollywood’s more unlikely casting calls as a big-screen father figure. There was a Clifton Webb film festival on TV the other day, and my wife taped all the movies, which is probably as good a Father’s Day gift as the neckties and other … Continue reading →