When I went away to college, I lived in a dorm named after Rev. Niebuhr, who was a pastor, theologian, and ethicist. My father wrote me letters addressed to Niebuhr Hall, and he would tuck a copy of the prayer he had clipped from a church bulletin.

OK, that might not be the best way to begin this. Let me start again.

Almost every Saturday and Tuesday morning, I go to the Woodstock farmer’s market, where besides finding the best produce and caramel corn, I listen to some of the best free music anywhere on this planet or any other.

I know myself to be an introvert, but I’m always a little bit shocked, on these rare occasions when I’m left alone, at how much of an introvert I am.

For four days, I happily went to work, came home, walked the dog, then attempted to do some laundry or sorting or cleaning before I eventually gave in to the temptation at hand: a novel I was reading, a limited series on Hulu I had been meaning to get to, or a podcast about a juicy Hollywood scandal.

But as the 18th Century Scottish poet Robert Burns famously wrote: “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Well, that’s not exactly how he said it. In the words of his place and time, it was: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!”

And so, as I say, tomorrow Gail and I would be toasting our long marriage, had things not “gang agley”.

We knew they were coming, but it didn’t make it any less jarring to see the tiny holes in the soil where they had suddenly emerged after their 17-year-long buffet of tender tree roots. They’re not a welcome sight for many, and cautious homeowners along neighborhood streets have carefully wrapped young saplings in white nets as a way of protecting trees in their infancy from the attack of cicadas.

Quirky? Twisted? Wonky?

Nope. Let’s go with askew. I can live with askew.

So you probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that I’m planting my Planet Kerth garden now, and this year I’ve decided not to do it the way most people on Planet Earth do it, but the way they do it on Planet Mars.

Well, they don’t do it that way on Mars yet, because right now Mars is pretty much totally uninhabited and un-gardened.

My daughter, tall and slender, stands at the apex of most of the group pictures. She is taller than the other girls, so she tips her head slightly, not out of shyness, but in deference to the height difference.

That’s because their favorite resting spot, the old purple cherry plum tree in my yard, is gone. It blew down on one of those blustery days in late April, just before the hummers got back in town.

That tree was my favorite of all the trees in my yard.

It is wild to me that over a week ago, we picked up two strangers from the airport. Ten days later, tears rolled down my cheeks as I said goodbye as they left for their flights home. I will miss them, my new Italian daughters.

The sky has that expectant pink hue to it. We are also expectant, having risen early from our little camping trailer to greet the sunrise. This was a planned thing, involving Google searches of when the sun would rise, earlier bedtime the night before, and several alarms set.

That’s because the long-awaited 17-year cicadas are clearing their throats underground just beneath the trees right now, and soon the branches above will ring with their robust songs. And every other time in my life that they’ve come to visit—four times in total before this time — they somehow found a way into my mouth.

My first encounter with the gigantic periodic bugs was in 1956, when I was eight years old.

I am accustomed to a house filled with voices and noise: laughter, instruments being practiced, “What’s for dinner?” being shouted, or the shower running for far too long. I’m used to hearing footsteps overhead, before they recede across the ceiling the way a shooting star appears in the corner of our eye, then disappear just as suddenly, leaving us to wonder if we only imagined it.

Mom earned a high school diploma from Leyden High School, but Dad left school at 14 to get a job to help support his family during the Great Depression. Had it not been for such hard economic times, he would have earned his high school diploma, too.

That’s because our government a century ago felt that education was important enough to guarantee that young people have the right to be educated through high school, funded by taxpayers.

The AP Stylebook is a substantial volume for journalists, students, and writers that, to me at least, deserves its own podium, open to the page about nonessential clauses, marked with a rich leather bookmark, a single light trained on its text.

And I thought, “Acme Barricades? Wile E. Coyote must be building this house.” Because if you’re a kid like me who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, Acme could mean only one thing: the Acme Catalog from which Coyote ordered every gadget imaginable to outwit Roadrunner — gadgets that failed spectacularly every time.

As soon as Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s headquarters carrying a sink (the caption to the video read, “Walking into Twitter HQ. Let that sink in,”) it was clear that Musk was more concerned with crafting Dad-jokey quips than he was about making the platform better, or at the very least keeping it clear from hate speech and disinformation.

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter X, it’s been steadily losing users, who are tired of the arbitrary changes and lack of content moderation.

I know that’s not the kind of confession you expect to hear every day, but there it is:

Today, I lost a ham.

“How does someone lose a ham?” my friend Anne asked when I told her.

“Well, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be able to un-lose it,” I said, so I tried to recreate the day’s stunning mystery as well as I could.

I went to the grocery store to pick up a few staples I was running low on — bananas, sour cream, grapes, juice, chips — and when I passed through the meat section a nice ham caught my eye.

The new year is a time for planning ahead as well as reminiscing about the “good ol’ days.” Our thoughts wandered to our youth when there were drive-in restaurants and hot cars. Nancy grew up in Franklin Park and was the proud owner of a Ford XL with a 429 cu.

Cats are so much easier than dogs, and Chicken and Waffles were no exception. They would meet me each day at the door by meowing and walking purposefully toward their food bowls, where they would sit and stare meaningfully from the bowl, to me, then back to the bowl again.

“What was the cause of the Civil War?” she was asked.

And rather than giving the answer that any ten-year-old American could give, she opted instead for nuance.

The Civil War was fought over “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” she said.

Of course, Haley was right in a technical sense, because embracing or abolishing slavery was all about “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”