Could there have been a better year than 2008 for a kid smitten by politics to start college?  Forget Hurricane Ike and what it did to Houston!  Thank goodness, Rice University took care of its talented student body and helped Houston, too.  But what about us — 2000  miles away?  We missed our son so much! At first, we tried filling our empty nest with a sweet cockatiel called Tilly. She sat on our shoulders and chirped whenever we played “Mame” for her.  But the house still felt empty. So, I volunteered on a big Senate campaign. You know when you’re on the phone trying to...

And do they wake up to smiling faces and a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries and sliced bananas and crushed almonds and walnuts?  Or do they cuddle up with the cockroaches deep in the walls?  Do they know who Laurie Colwin was and why she’s still my favorite author, or do they squirm around without books in lonely ditches? I know what certain spammers were up to when they should have been sleeping.  They bombarded one of my posts with almost 2000 brainless ads. So I finally decided to surrender my tribute, “Spring Forward,” all about Spring and Maestro Sixten Ehrling (once a...