In the movie, Notting Hill, there is a bench in a garden with an inscription: “For June who loved this garden, from Joseph who always sat beside her.” We have a bench and we like to sit on it. I don’t think we are at...

My favorite Robert Frost poem is “After Apple Picking”. It is a wonderful poem in which Frost, just as he drifts off to sleep, has all the images of picking apples running through his mind. I know there are all sorts of...

In the movie, The Milagro Beanfield War, directed by Robert Redford, Amarante is an ancient old man with thick glasses. In his first scene, he wakes up in his long johns, hacks and coughs and staggers to an old mirror. He looks at...

Gore Vidal’s Lincoln is a great movie/mini series. Sam Waterston studied dialect for weeks and is a fantastic Lincoln and Mary Tyler Moore is a wonderful Mary Todd Lincoln. Vidal did fine research, including using John Hay’s...